Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters

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Author: Constance M. Furey

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erasmus, contarini, and the religious republic of letters Though the paradigm of modernist progression has been challenged on many fronts, Erasmus and other sixteenth-century literati are still commonly viewed as people who led the way from a religious Middle Ages to a more godless modern era. Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters complicates this view by analyzing a unique realm of spiritualized scholarship that cannot fit easily into any conventional intellectual chronology. By analyzing the lives, work, and correspondence of Erasmus, Thomas More, Margaret More Roper, Reginald Pole, Gasparo Contarini, and Vittoria Colonna, this book demonstrates how these Catholic men and women of letters created a distinctive kind of religious community rooted in friendship and shared intellectual and spiritual pursuits. By spanning the toofrequently-respected gap between humanist reformers in Northern and Southern Europe, this book uncovers a widespread, if previously less visible, network that exhibited concerns we still grapple with today. And, in contrast to histories that focus on politics and new economies of representation, the book demonstrates how the religious search for meaning shaped contemporary assumptions about friendship, gender, and the value of reading and writing. Constance M. Furey is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Religion and Church History, and during the 2005–06 school year she is a research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard University.

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Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters constance m. furey Indiana University

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cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011 -4211, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521849876 c Constance M. Furey 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2006 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Furey, Constance M. Erasmus, Contarini, and the religious republic of letters / Constance M. Furey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn-13: 978-0-521-84987-6 (hardback) isbn-10: 0-521-84987-x (hardback) 1. Catholics – Intellectual life. 2. Catholic Church – History – 16th century. 3. Europe – Intellectual life. 4. Catholic learning and scholarship. 5. Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536. 6. Contarini, Gasparo, 1483–1542. I. Title. bx1795.i57f87 2006 282 .4 09031 – dc22 2005017284 isbn-13 978-0-521-84987-6 hardback isbn-10 0-521-84987-x hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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In memory of Jim Furey

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Contents

Note on Texts

page ix

Abbreviations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction

1

1

A New Kind of Religious Life

14

2

Creating an Alternative Community

55

3

The Spiritual Quest

86

4

Necessary Relationships

118

5

Defining the Ideal

146

Epilogue

166

Notes

171

Bibliography

225

Index

247

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Note on Texts

In cases where I did my own translations from primary sources that are not readily available, I quoted the original language in the notes. I also transcribed the original Italian for Vittoria Colonna’s poetry, although it is available in a modern critical edition, because of the particular difficulties involved in translating poetry. In quoting early printed material, I have modernized punctuation and capitalization.

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Abbreviations

Allen ASD CWE CWTM LB

P. S. Allen. Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. 12 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906–1958. Opera omnia Desiderii Roterodami recognita et adnotatione critica instructa notisque illustrata. Amsterdam, 1969–. Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1976–. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. 15 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963–1997. Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia. Ed. Johannes Clericus. 10 vols. Leiden, 1703–1706.

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Acknowledgments

In writing a book about how scholars created a community for themselves, I have been the grateful recipient of support from existing institutions. The Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion and the Fellowship for Theological Educators at the University of Chicago gave me a chance to think through early versions of some of the ideas that have borne fruit here, thanks in no small part to the intellectual guidance provided by Stephanie Paulsell and Clark Gilpin. A summer faculty grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to significantly expand the scope of the project, and additional faculty fellowships from Indiana University made it possible for me to finish the book. I have been fortunate also in the teachers, colleagues, and friends who have turned these institutions into communities. Susan Ashbrook Harvey inspired me, as she has so many others, to become an academic, and she remains a model still. Since my first year in graduate school, Susan Schreiner has been an exemplary advisor both personally and professionally. David Tracy and Rachel Fulton propelled me forward at crucial junctures with probing questions and insights. Various drafts of this study have benefited greatly from Jonathan Moore’s editorial skills and critiques, and all of my thinking has been informed by a conversation with Rebecca Schorsch that began in the first week of graduate school and continues unabated. Indiana University has been a veritable trove of intellectually exciting and generous colleagues: Robert Orsi helped me frame the project in its present form, and for reading my work and encouraging it with perceptive comments I am particularly grateful to Jonathan Sheehan, Dror Wahrman, Sarah Knott, Konstantin Dierks (who deserves special thanks for reading first drafts of each chapter), Rebecca Wilkin, Ellen MacKay, and, among my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies, David Brakke, Richard Miller, Steven Stein, Mary Jo Weaver, and Steve Weitzman. Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth Clark, and Lu Ann Homza all xiii


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

aided me through their own scholarship and specific suggestions about mine, Christopher Black gave the whole manuscript a remarkably generous reading, Elisabeth Gleason offered a well-timed comment that sent me down the path of investigating how my subjects created a new kind of religious life, Thomas Mayer read Chapter 2 closely and saved me from many errors, and Amy Hollywood’s intellectual energy repeatedly gave me new enthusiasm for this project. Andrew Beck, at Cambridge University Press, has been an ideal editor – encouraging, efficient, and thoughtful. I am grateful also to Marie Deer, who compiled the index, and three wonderful graduate students – Mark Wilson, Steve Taysom, and Ellen Muehlberger – for timely help. Books, of course, spill out beyond the world of work, and so thanks are due also to my family. Spencer, Arlene, Gretchen, Felix, Sarah, Jon, and Grace have sustained me in numerous ways for many years. I appreciate Veronica’s interest in a process that largely goes on beyond closed doors, but I appreciate even more her ability to pose (frequently) the crucial question: “Why are you going to work on your book?” Jason Fickel has been a partner in all things and my first and best reader. My mother, Peg Furey, has been generous both financially and emotionally, and an endless source of excitement and fun. There is boundless sadness in the fact that I cannot show this book to the person who first taught me the joys of conversation. Although he believed in private satisfactions and would have questioned my desire to thank him publicly, I want nevertheless to record my gratitude to my father, Jim Furey, who offered me a vision of life in which questions are as exciting as answers.

some ideas and passages in this book have appeared in earlier forms in articles I published in Church History and Journal of Religion and I am grateful to the American Society of Church History and to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint.

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Introduction: Knowing Friends, Knowing God

But what a sidetrack our discourse is taking! My intention was to outline a way of life for you, not a course of study. Erasmus, Enchiridion (1503)

T

his disclaimer should give us pause. elsewhere in erasmus’s great handbook of lay piety he tells Christians that they need knowledge as well as prayer to persevere against the forces of evil, and Erasmus was himself a great scholar. Together with his celebration of an interior piety accessible to lay people, his emphasis on the spiritual meaning of the Bible, and his critiques of ritualism, this assertion that learning is the cornerstone of a good Christian way of life is widely viewed as a hallmark of Erasmian spirituality. There are pungent critiques of scholarship in the Enchiridion, but this is because, as John O’Malley explains, Erasmus thought that so much scholarship was badly done. Like many other Catholic intellectuals, Erasmus blamed scholasticism for promoting the notion that theology was a contemplative discipline, divorced from piety and ministry. Contemporary theologians, he thought, subsequently promoted an arid intellectualism.1 The easiest way to interpret Erasmus’s claim that he had gotten waylaid by talking about scholarship, then, is to conclude that he was trying to get his readers to think about the relationship between learning and life. His basic message seems clear: People should look beyond narrowly defined academic disciplines in order to embrace the sort of knowledge that encourages virtuous living. But Erasmus’s dismayed outburst also betrays a notable uncertainty lurking at the edges of his confident message – an uncertainty about exactly how scholarship and spirituality ought to be merged. Post-enlightenment readers who are sympathetic with Erasmus often perceive his vision of Christianity as a prescient affirmation of their own intuitions. From this perspective, the claim that 1



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ERASMUS, CONTARINI, AND THE RELIGIOUS REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

learning is compatible with religion seems perfectly uncomplicated – as long as religion is redefined to exclude irrational notions of transcendence, sacramentality, or the superiority of specialists such as priests or monks. Yet Erasmus was addressing a spiritual elite. Not only was the Enchiridion – like everything else he wrote – in Latin, but notwithstanding the widespread assumption that its message was intended for a broad swathe of lay Christians, the work dealt with issues that Erasmus perceived as urgent for people like himself. “In sum,” as James Tracy puts it, “Erasmus was writing for cultivated souls who could understand themselves both as citizens of the republic of letters and as individual members of the Body of Christ.”2 For these sorts of people, whom I describe variously as intellectuals, literati, and men and women of letters,3 the question of how to integrate learning and piety was at the heart of their search for meaning and salvation. Thus Erasmus’s exclamation of dismay gestures toward an urgent question that many Catholic literati shared: What was the relationship between what one studied and how one lived? How, in other words, should scholars spiritualize their work and live a religious life? In Erasmus’s life, scholarship and spirituality were two sides of the same coin: A life of scholarship was a religious way of life. But instead of simply accepting the two as fixed images, Erasmus puzzled over them, looking from one to the other, testing and questioning their respective worth. Other highly educated people (Catholics in particular, for reasons I will discuss further on) did the same thing. For these literati seeking a meaningful way of life, there was no model ready to hand. Christian scholars traditionally had been housed in monasteries and universities, but many intellectuals in the sixteenth century shared Erasmus’s sense that monasticism was badly flawed, and that most of what university professors wrote and read about was hopelessly abstract and convoluted. The literati all believed that meaning was to be found through Christ, and that what one did on earth either precluded or enabled an eternal relationship with God; these convictions in themselves, though, did not answer their questions about how to live. Moreover, sixteenth-century society posed numerous challenges for any Christians who hoped that life in the world could satisfy their need for meaning. Christian princes launched wars against other Christians; the violence reached a symbolic climax when the Christian emperor’s army sacked Rome in 1527. The dramatic expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and their continued presence in other European countries vividly brought home the point that the Christian goal of universality had yet to succeed even within Europe. The ominous advance of the Turks, who by 1529 threatened to attack the walls of Vienna, raised real fears about the survival of Christendom. Meanwhile, the growing influence of Martin Luther’s protest against the church (which



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began in 1517) and the ensuing, increasingly intractable, conflict between Catholics and Protestants destroyed any illusions that Christians were unified. For many, including Luther, these were signs that the end of the world was imminent. Even for Erasmus and others who did not dwell on the apocalypse, these historical developments were harsh reminders that Christianity had not created peace, even among Christians within Europe.4 These violent conflicts created a high-pitched distortion that was hard to ignore, but the social and intellectual changes that resonated at a lower register were arguably more disturbing. The rise of centralized governments raised newly acute fears about tyranny, and the fact that a few key courts monopolized financial and cultural resources meant that in much of sixteenth-century Europe, patronage was both more crucial and more impersonal than it had been throughout the Middle Ages. The emergence of humanism, with its emphasis on the skillful use of language, inspired anxious questions about the relationship between inner virtue and external show. Good speech was a sign of virtue, but it also could be a remarkably effective source of deception. The widespread emphasis (at least among the upper classes) on flattery, praise, and gifts reinforced the belief that ambition could destroy society, and it spawned an elusive quest for sincerity.5 At the same time, new intellectual movements undermined learned people’s confidence about where and how to find truth, which resulted in what Heiko Oberman argues was a distinctive sense of crisis.6 Old arguments about the relationship between the will and the intellect became newly urgent as intellectuals debated the merits of scholasticism (based on logic and philosophy) versus humanism (which emphasized rhetoric). Scholars recovered previously unknown texts by ancient Skeptics, and many literati found philosophical skepticism frightening but compelling: If skepticism undermined any claims to certain knowledge, it could also be used to support the notion that people were right to base their beliefs on faith rather than intellectual arguments. Moreover, the ideas developed by nominalist theologians were widely influential, in part because their basic claim that the human world was the contingent creation of an all-powerful God redrew the dividing line between sacred and profane, and underscored that words alone link the mind and reality, the soul and God. Although nominalist writing was highly technical and modeled on scholastic dialectic rather than humanist rhetoric, nominalism and humanism were similar in that both movements placed a new and unrelenting pressure on words. Humanist rhetoricians explicitly argued that good speech – eloquent, persuasive, compelling language – can change people; as preachers as well as professors, nominalist thinkers similarly emphasized that whether written or spoken, read or heard, words were supposed to appeal not to the mind but to the heart, not to reason but to faith. Thus nominalists and humanists



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alike stressed that it was not enough for words to be comprehensible; they should also be transformative.7 For elite, highly educated Catholics, these political, social, and intellectual changes made spiritual meaning hard to find. Many prominent intellectuals, in Northern and Southern Europe alike, looked to the Gospels and to the Pauline letters in particular and found there a message that faith and love were the essence of Christianity. This widespread impulse has long been recognized as a significant feature of the sixteenth-century landscape, but there has never been consensus about what to call it. Early in the twentieth century a French scholar, Pierre Imbart de La Tour, coined the term evangelism (l’évangelisme), a label that recurs periodically but that never became popular in English-language scholarship (perhaps because “evangelical” is widely used to describe conservative modern Christian movements). Scholars who study Italy have long preferred the term spirituali, and scholars who want to talk about a movement of reform-minded Catholics in the North still often use the term Christian humanism (though most now agree that the term is misleading insofar as it implies there were non-Christian humanists at the time).8 No matter whether these Catholics are described as Christian humanists, spirituali, or part of the movement of evangelism, it is generally agreed that they failed to influence the Church in their own day. Catholics like Erasmus did not revamp the church hierarchy, pastor to sick people, cultivate an educated populace, or successfully instill harmony between Protestants and Catholics. By the 1550s, zealous conservatives – led by Cardinal Giampietro Carafa, who became Pope Paul IV in 1555 – firmly controlled the Catholic curia, and the move to impose orthodoxy and confessional identity gained steam. It seems that highly educated, pious Catholics were too timid to forsake the Church, too invested in private spirituality to inspire real reform and – by implication – were important primarily insofar as they can be shown to represent the seeds of an enlightened modern Catholicism or a genealogy of moderates within the Church.9 These learned Catholics are, however, fascinating for the same reason that many were ineffective reformers: They found themselves straddling a yawning gap between their ideals and reality and struggling to regain their equilibrium. Buffeted by the bureaucratization and professionalization that took hold in the sixteenth century, they were further unsettled by the problems they encountered when they tried to get spiritual sustenance from books and ideas. They responded to these troubles by turning to each other and by using praise to affirm the boundaries and the spiritual value of their circle of friends. The popularity of friendship among reform-minded Catholics is wellknown but not yet fully analyzed. There are a couple of reasons for this. Because friendship seems timeless, it is difficult to historicize; because it is presumed



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to be an essentially private relationship, it is tempting simply to interpret the enthusiasm for friendship – particularly among prominent people – as a sign of their lack of interest in social and political activism. This is how the spirituali in particular have often been interpreted. But in the sixteenth century, friendship had religious significance that should not just be taken for granted or dismissed as elitism. This insight is central to Alan Bray’s extraordinary recent book The Friend, which argues that from the Middle Ages well into the eighteenth century, friendships were not “set apart” or private but were instead public, religious relationships developed in order to navigate the dangerous world of public transactions. Building on a Durkheimian premise, Bray defines religion as a response to danger – an instrument people used to bind themselves together in conditions of peaceful coexistence, and he notes that friendship was persistently associated with the Eucharist – the rite that John Bossy (also drawing on Durkheim) established long ago was a successful instrument of social cohesion. In England this association persisted even after the religious reforms of the sixteenth century, and for Bray, the perdurance of this and traditional kinship networks explains why the significance of friendship changed little between 1300 and 1700.10 I share Bray’s premise that religion is about relationships (as well as meaning), but I am more interested in how people subjectively experience the relationships they create than in the general contours of social solidarity that religion etches out. Thus in this study I focus on a narrow sliver of time in order to analyze how a subjective sense of crisis sparked by relatively subtle social and intellectual developments could change people’s perceptions of how and why specific kinds of relationships were meaningful. Catalyzed by the specific tensions and pressures of a particular historical moment, Catholic intellectuals sought out friendships with one another in order to demarcate a realm of spiritual meaning – a new kind of religious community bound together by affective relationships and shared interests in spiritualized scholarship.

the main characters in this study include erasmus (1469–1536), Thomas More (1477–1535), and Margaret More Roper (1505–1544), from Northern Europe. As a famous scholar, Erasmus was supported by patrons, friends, and the proceeds from his published books. He wrote educational treatises, a collection of classical proverbs, scholarly editions and paraphrases of the New Testament, a handbook of Christian piety, over a thousand letters, and a controversial debate with Martin Luther about free will. Erasmus’s good friend Thomas More composed literary, apologetic, and exegetical works in both English and Latin, including several letters defending Erasmus and humanist studies. As a writer he is perhaps most famous



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for Utopia, his book about an imaginary commonwealth, and notorious for his heated polemics against Luther and Matthew Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English. More had a wife and children, and he was a lawyer and Lord Chancellor for Henry VIII, but he is best known as a Catholic martyr who was executed by Henry’s government in 1535 for his refusal to sign the oath that effectively affirmed Henry’s break with Rome. One of his daughters was Margaret More Roper, a woman widely celebrated by More’s peers for her skill in Latin and her exemplary scholarly mien. Educated at home by humanist tutors alongside her brother, sisters, and other members of More’s large household, Roper wrote polished letters in Latin and English to her father and other learned men. In 1524, when she was only nineteen, Roper translated one of Erasmus’s devotional works into English, and it appeared in print that year as A devout treatise upon the Pater noster with an anonymous attribution to a “young, virtuous, and well learned gentlewoman of nineteen years of age.” Three editions of the work were issued by 1530.11 Our other main characters – Reginald Pole (1500–1558), Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), and Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547) – were prominent spirituali who lived and worked primarily in Italy. Pole was born in England but spent most of his adult life on the Italian peninsula. His works included an encomium for a friend in humanist Latin, and a long epistolary treatise (De unitate) to Henry VIII defending church unity. A possible candidate for the papacy in 1549 and the Archbishop of Canterbury during the short-lived restoration of Catholicism in England in the 1550s, Pole was also investigated by the Roman Inquisition because of suspicions that he sympathized with the Protestant teaching that salvation was achieved through faith alone. Over the years his household included numerous scholars from England and Italy; he knew More and was one of the many men who spoke of Roper admiringly; he corresponded with Erasmus; and he was quite close to the Italians Colonna and Contarini. Like Pole, Contarini could claim noble status, and he spent years as a gentleman scholar before becoming a Venetian ambassador and, later, a cardinal who, together with Pole and others, took part in the papal reform commission that issued the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia in 1538. In addition to reams of letters, he wrote unpublished works of philosophy, theology, and history in Latin and Italian. He died in 1542, shortly after his controversial – and futile – attempt at Regensburg to get Protestants and Catholics to agree on a compromise doctrine of justification. When Contarini died, Pole was the papal governor in Viterbo, near Rome; one of their mutual friends who had moved there to be near him was Vittoria Colonna. Colonna is best known in history as Michelangelo’s beloved friend, but she is also famous as the first published female poet on the peninsula,



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and she was a prominent figure on the literary scene as well as an active participant in ecclesial politics. Colonna wrote numerous letters, as well as Petrarchan sonnets and religious meditations in Italian, and she exchanged laudatory poems not only with men but also with other women, including Gaspara Stampa, a famous Italian poet, and Marguerite de Navarre, a writer and a French queen. I chose these characters – women as well as men, Northerners as well as Southerners – because modern studies about intellectual Christians in the sixteenth century rarely look across these divides of gender and geography. We often study Southern and Northern European thinkers separately not only because of the linguistic and historical knowledge required to compare them, but also (and more fatefully) because of the enduring assumption that intellectual energy flowed northward over the course of the Renaissance – that the classical humanism revived by Italians was Christianized and revitalized in the Northern Renaissance.12 Similarly, scholarship about elite women in this period tends either to analyze them separately by focusing on their tenuous position as female scholars, or to analyze them alongside male intellectuals and evangelicals in a way that deemphasizes gender. These two approaches need to be synthesized.13 A few highly educated lay women of the period were in fact part of the literati’s network, and these women grappled with many of the same questions that perplexed their male peers. As women, however, their presence also had a gendered significance because they infused the intellectual sphere with an aura of feminized spirituality. Important also is the fact that although my subjects stand in different places on the spectrum of lay to religious, none of them was a permanent resident of a religious order. More and Roper were not only lay but married, Colonna was a widow who never joined an order though she resided in convents, Erasmus reluctantly – or so he later claimed – joined a monastery of Augustinian canons in the Low Countries while still a teenager, but left in his twenties and spent the rest of his life working as a scholar.14 Contarini never married but took orders only when he became a cardinal in 1535, when he was in his fifties. Pole, too, was unmarried. He became a cardinal in his thirties but was not ordained until he was fifty-six, when he became Archbishop of Canterbury.15 As these details suggest, the line between lay and religious was not clearly defined in ways we might expect. Throughout the Middle Ages, scholars often received the legal privileges accorded to clerics, whether or not the scholars were tonsured or ordained. Cardinals were not necessarily priests. And with the rise of humanism we can look to the case of Petrarch – who probably took minor ecclesiastical orders but who presented poetry as his religious vocation – to see that even for those who were officially “religious,” their church offices



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did not necessarily determine their perception of what a religious life should be.16 These blurred boundaries are relevant for our purposes because the Catholic literati studied here shared certain experiences and interests despite differences in their “lay” or “religious” status: Their daily lives and practices were not structured primarily by the traditions and communal customs of a religious order. As we will see, they created a new kind of religious life. This book attempts to explain why and how.

we begin in chapter 1 with the two most well-known char acters in our group, Erasmus and More, and two very different visions of sixteenth-century Christianity. Because scholars regularly invoke Erasmus and More as representative figures, analyzing the generalizations about Christianity that the two are used to illustrate is a good way of clarifying what is at stake in my re-reading of their concerns. Specifically, when characterizing early modern Catholicism in particular, we continue to rely (albeit more implicitly than in the past) on two sets of dichotomy: medieval versus modern and fideistic versus intellectually optimistic. On the one hand, old questions about whether Christianity shed its medieval skin in the sixteenth century and emerged in a form more suited to modernity still structure our thinking, and it has proven difficult to create a narrative history of early modern Christianity that is not built around the drama this dichotomy provides. On the other hand, scholars still seldom assess the Renaissance and Reformation (whether Catholic or Protestant) as manifestations of the same culture, in part because the former seems to be aligned with intellectual optimism whereas the latter promoted fideism. A key indicator of the way these dichotomies can distort our vision is that Erasmus and More are often invoked together because they were great friends who publicly embraced humanist scholarship, yet they are also interpreted as men on opposite sides of the divide: More seems more “medieval” because he wore a hair shirt under his clothes and performed acts of penance alone at night, and because of his zealous fidelity to the institutional church and vehement condemnation of the vernacular Bible. Erasmus, by contrast, is most familiar as the model scholar and critic of superstition. I argue, though, that these contrasts (and the reliance on dichotomies that they represent) are misleading insofar as they obscure the fact that Erasmus and More both (like many other intellectual Catholics) were intensely interested in spiritualizing scholarship and in pursuing this work within the context of a religious community. The community they sought was neither a religious order nor the Church as a whole. Instead, they were interested in forging a noninstitutional community of friends and fellow scholars defined by a shared religious goal: to spiritualize their scholarly work and their relationships with



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one another. Chapter 1 thus serves as a synecdoche for the rest of the book by describing how community was significant in their lives and their work on several overlapping levels: as a hermeneutic, a locus of spiritual practices, a manifestation of spiritual values, and a pathway for intimacy with each other and with Christ. The next two chapters analyze the external and internal reasons why the Christian literati pursued community in the way that they did. Chapter 2 uses Pole’s writings to argue that Catholic literati were motivated to seek meaning elsewhere because of their deep ambivalence about patronage, professionalization, and the failings of the institutional church. They did not simply retreat into the world of friendships, but insisted on the religious significance of the community their friends created. This argument is based on cross-cultural work about friendship and patron–client relationships by S. N. Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger. Starting with the premise that humans are social animals not only for material reasons but also for spiritual ones as well (that is, concerned with meaning, trust, and other nonutilitarian values, with or without reference to a deity), the authors trace how different social structures influence the sorts of relationships people develop in order to meet these needs.17 In relatively simple, kinship-based societies, for example, both kinds of need can be met by extended family relationships. Things become more complicated in societies with more institutions and many different spheres.18 When societies are highly developed and strong institutional structures have emerged, as in modern Western societies, the boundaries between institutional (or utilitarian) and affective (or spiritual) relationships are fairly clear. In other words, in these social contexts there is a clear assumption that relationships formed within institutions are governed by utilitarian calculations, and thus are not supposed to satisfy an individual’s desire for relationships that address spiritual needs. In this sort of society, people tend to invest separate, private relationships – like friendships and companionate marriages – with spiritual value. In sociological parlance, Eisenstadt and Roniger conclude that the more institutionalized and differentiated the social order, the more people privilege the separate sphere of interpersonal relationships. This is the world modern Westerners live in: highly differentiated societies where people regularly assume that personal friendships are qualitatively different and superior to relationships that are established and regulated by institutions – for instance, between boss and worker, senator and constituent, or lawyer and client. But in sixteenth-century Europe, these sorts of clear structural differences had not yet emerged. On the one hand, European societies were no longer feudal; they had some bureaucratic institutions in place and they were developing centralized state structures. On the other hand, systems that putatively



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satisfied spiritual needs (patronage, professions, and the church) were becoming institutions or were responsible for more comprehensive institutional functions than they had been previously.19 This created a situation that engendered ambivalence: When relationships that putatively embody trust and meaning are institutionalized, Eisenstadt and Roniger observe, people seek out other highly symbolic interpersonal relationships and “go beyond them into the realm of pure, undiluted meaning and trust, uncontaminated by exigencies of power or instrumental considerations.”20 Thus Catholic literati who were part of the patronage system and deeply invested in intellectual status and the institutional church sought out a separate realm to satisfy their need for meaning. There was, however, a problem with this solution. The separation between realms was not easy to achieve, because patronage, professionalization, and the church – the very systems that motivated these literati to seek out other relationships – were themselves based on affective or spiritual claims. The most obvious answer for learned types was to retreat to one’s study and pick up a book. Humanism, monasticism, devotional literature, and the evangelical emphasis on Scripture all taught that meaning could be found and the dross of daily life overcome by reading and writing. But when devout literati opened their books, they often encountered a new set of intellectual and psychological problems. Chapter 3 tracks this set of problems by focusing in particular on Contarini’s ambivalence about reading and Colonna’s uncertainties about writing. Colonna and Contarini gave voice to a question that many Catholic intellectuals confronted: How do reading, writing, and thinking engender knowledge of God? In part because of the intellectual trends that were emerging, this question struck pious men and women of letters as urgent and unanswered. Unlike their peers in religious orders who lived in a context where traditional answers were reinforced daily by ritualized prayer and devotional reading, the literati spent much of their time dealing with business, money, politics, or family. The men among them had official positions or had to support themselves with their work. Erasmus was a published scholar; More was paid for his work as a lawyer; Pole and Contarini became cardinals. The women did not hold public office but they too had busy lives outside of monasteries. What men and women of letters shared was a desire to find spiritual meaning, along with what was at times an acutely anxious awareness that this meaning was not always easy to discern, even when they concentrated on the books and ideas that promised religious enlightenment and pointed the way toward salvation. These well-educated Catholics responded in two ways: by turning to each other; and by trying to create communally affirmed ideals that merged religious charisma with moderate, learned piety. The first response – forging



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a link between human relationships and spiritual journeys – is explored in Chapter 4, where we see how the difficulties of attaining emotional transformation and illumination through texts led many to focus on friendship and spiritual advisors. We find Erasmus on one end of the spectrum of experiences, insisting that texts were valuable not because words signify ideas, but because words can convey presence and enable the reader to encounter the author (be it Christ, Cicero, or a distant contemporary friend) as if in person. On the other end of the spectrum we will see that Contarini set aside his Bible in frustration, insisting that books had to be supplemented by conversations. Colonna stands somewhere in the middle: She relied on the written word in the sense that she found writing poems an effective way to express her search for God, but she sought illumination through a book of the Cross rather than the written Bible, and invoked saints and living guides to make this illumination efficacious. Chapter 5 analyzes the second response – the creation of a communal ideal – and argues that one way this nebulous network of friends took on a communal identity was through praise. It fits our stereotype of upper-class Renaissance Christians to say that they used praise to curry favor, win friends, and inspire moral and spiritual virtues, and it is well-known that humanist rhetoricians developed clear directives for when and how the rhetoric of praise should be used. Chapter 5, however, looks at a different dimension of the Renaissance interest in praise by focusing on how pious literati used praise to articulate a spiritual ideal. The encomia offered by learned Catholics were distinctive in a couple of ways. These words of praise simultaneously both reiterated the admirable qualities of traditional religious figures, and transformed them. Specifically, highly educated religious seekers praised women, fools, or martyrs, and in doing so they praised extraordinary piety and learned knowledge. Traditionally, exceptional figures were symbols of religious inversion – the humble woman who received divine revelation, the fool who is wise in the eyes of God, or the martyr who sacrifices life in this world in order to gain it in the next – but in the cases I analyze, pious scholars praised figures who possessed qualities the scholars admired in themselves. These literati thereby infused their own way of life with sacred charisma, while reconfiguring charisma in their own image. Through praise and friendships these Catholic men and women of letters created a religious community that did not require them to withdraw from the world even as it addressed their need for meaning.

the prevailing social, religious, and intellectual environment was shared by Protestants and Catholics, but this is not a story about Protestants, because the religious schism affected Catholics and Protestants



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differently. Learned men and women who committed themselves to a Protestant vision of Christianity between 1520 and 1550 were part of a new religious movement: They were, in other words, part of a founding generation rather than a second or third generation of followers. Consequently, they were often imbued with the fervor that necessarily takes hold in the early years of a new movement. Though they read the same texts, wrote about the same questions, and were part of the same scholarly networks as their Catholic counterparts, the Protestants’ actions and ideas were guided by a wholehearted commitment to specific theological ideas that, as they soon came to see, required them to radically reform or reject the institutional Catholic Church. Although their Catholic counterparts were deeply interested in reform and, in many cases, deeply sympathetic to the idea that salvation is achieved through faith alone, the Catholics were, by inclination, more conservative than rebellious. The Catholics were subject to pressures that were overshadowed for the Protestants by the energy and demands of a new religious movement. The religious community created by the Catholic intellectuals studied in this book was a virtual community, akin to what is widely referred to as the Republic of Letters. The Republic of Letters has long intrigued scholars because it was, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an imagined community that seemed to embody the virtues that modern liberalism embraced: inclusivity and civility. It was held together by shared codes of conduct and modes of interaction – civil conversations and rational discourse. The German sociologist Jürgen Habermas came to identify the Republic of Letters as a source of modern civil society. According to Habermas, the Republic of Letters is important to our history because it was there that European men of letters created a public sphere that engendered the modern style of political discourse, and historians who have amended his thesis – notably Dena Goodman, who elegantly demonstrates that this community was created by women as well as men – similarly focus on how the Republic of Letters contributed to modern notions of the public.21 The similarity between the secular Republic of Letters and the virtual community examined here is not coincidental, but most scholars who study the Republic of Letters present religion either as the rival who faded into the background or as the villain who inspired people to embrace secular ideals. A more nuanced analysis of the relationship between religion and scholarship is suggested by Lisa Jardine’s book, Erasmus, Man of Letters, which demonstrates how Erasmus created a new model for the European intellectual. Jardine argues that with Erasmus “we are witnessing the transition from ‘sacred’ to ‘learned’ as the grounds for personal spiritual salvation.”22 But Jardine’s perceptive interpretation should be evaluated in light of Debora Shuger’s argument that



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it is a mistake to assume that “sacred or Christian culture was drained, emptied out, to provide modern culture with sufficient intellectual and symbolic capital to start up its own economy.”23 Shuger’s critique is particularly important for those who study the development of intellectual culture in early modern Europe. Here the much-maligned evolutionary model of historiography has proven surprisingly resilient. In most other areas – in the study of rituals, lived religion, gender relations, political systems – the idea of an inevitable progression from collective worship of spiritual deities to an individualistic pursuit of freedom and self-determination has wilted under the heat of numerous challenges. However, the image of intellectuals shedding a sense of the sacred in order to embrace devotion to scholarship remains seductively compelling. “For intellectual historians,” Jardine observes, “the very idea of the international man of letters has been developed, sharpened, polished, and eventually internalized as a set of professional aspirations, under the continuous influence of Erasmus studies.” Under these lights, Erasmus becomes “the model for the detached and disinterested” (for which we can read secular and modern) “pursuit of learning.”24 Jardine makes a compelling argument that the community Erasmus and others like him created should be intriguing to nonspecialists, but she implies that it is relevant above all because it was an embryonic form of the secular Republic of Letters. The community is intriguing in its own right, however – not just because it was important to the sixteenth century, but because by exploring its religious characteristics more fully, we can gain new perspectives on our own assumptions about the putative divorce between religion and scholarship. The Religious Republic of Letters examined in this book has a story we cannot hear properly when we listen with ears cocked expectantly for the secular finale.25 Instead of pursuing rational detachment through dispassionate interactions in service to human society stripped of the sacred, the people in this Religious Republic of Letters created affective, activist friendships and committed themselves to spiritualized scholarship because in their lives the search for meaning was synonymous with the quest for transcendence, the desire for salvation, and the longing for God. Their passionate convictions on this point may be foreign to modern, secular intellectuals, but the problem they were trying to solve may be more familiar than we are inclined to acknowledge. This is, at least, the question that the following study about sixteenth-century men and women of letters hopes to bring to the fore.

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A New Kind of Religious Life

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rasmus’s breezy colloquy, “the abbot and the learned lady,” features a monk and a laywoman who spar about the value of knowledge. In this caustic Christian critique of ignorance, abbot Antronius (“ass”) is no match for the eloquent wife and mother, Magdalia (whose name evokes Mary Magdalen). Surrounded by books, Magdalia eloquently defends scholarship as Antronius lives up to his name by condemning her quest for knowledge and affirming the value of money and glory. Even monks, Antronius explains, should shun knowledge because it encourages pride and disobedience. Moreover, as the leader of a monastery, a monk must meet courtly and monastic obligations alike, and so his hours are filled with prayers, hunting, and court business – activities that leave him no time or desire for wisdom.1 Magdalia claims not only that it is better to be a learned lay person than a monk, but also that educated women are better than benighted men. Antronius and his ilk, she warns, could be overtaken by others like her: “In Spain and Italy there are not a few women of the highest rank who can rival any man. In England there are the More girls, in Germany the Pirckheimer and Blarer girls. If you’re not careful, the net result will be that we’ll preside in the theological schools, preach in the churches, and wear your miters.”2 When Atronius responds to this image of women in clerical garb with a horrified passivity – “God forbid!” – Magdalia calls him on it: “No, it will be up to you to forbid.” His religious world, she warns him, is slipping away and he needs to catch up: “But if you keep on as you’ve begun, geese may do the preaching sooner than put up with you tongue-tied pastors.3 The world’s a stage that’s topsy-turvy now, as you see. Every man must play his part or – exit.” Antronius, ever the stooge, can offer only the wan hope that things might again play out on his terms: “When you come calling on us . . . we’ll dance, drink as much as we please, hunt, play games, and laugh.” But Magdalia has the last word: “For my part,” she concludes, “I feel like laughing now.”4 14

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Erasmus’s confident claim that learning will redeem Christianity, condensed into two hundred lines of banter in this colloquy and iterated throughout his vast corpus, looks like a progressive vision of religious reform and the beginning of modern Christianity. This vision is familiar. The pursuit of knowledge should not be left to professional theologians, nor piety to monks. Wisdom can be acquired by all people, including women, who read good books, and this knowledge has both secular and religious use – creating not only more virtuous Christians but also better housewives or businessmen. Monks and ignorant clergy are laughable because they mistakenly believe that superficial things – whether long prayers or horse rides – are good even though neither engenders real wisdom or true Christianity. Lay people who read classical and early Christian sources will, when necessary, use their knowledge of examples from the early church to challenge ecclesiastical authority, just as Magdalia supported her argument that women should be learned by listing names of women from the past. Education will inspire people to reject the hocus-pocus of religious rituals in order to focus instead on Christ’s core teachings of faith and love.5 Although Erasmus’s optimistic image of lay piety still looms large in our descriptions of sixteenth-century Christianity, intellectuals in Erasmus’s day were also pessimistic about scholarship insofar as they were fervently convinced that knowledge encouraged hubris and a fatal self-reliance. This is the cautionary message Thomas More offered up when he translated the Life of Pico into English in 1510.6 The Life, originally written in Latin, told the story of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), a famous Italian scholar and philosopher who set out to learn the secrets of the universe. Pico wrote a well-known work, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), and ran afoul of the church for what it perceived as his scholarly arrogance and the claim that God’s word was known, albeit indirectly, by non-Christian thinkers. Perhaps thinking of Pico as a man much like himself, More explains that while still a “beardless child,” Pico’s diligent study and native brilliance made him “both a perfect philosopher and a perfect divine,” and then More emphasizes that this balance of philosophy and theology was merely a step on the way toward learning humility.7 The Life of Pico consequently argues that the condemnation of the Church was unjust but fortuitous, because it persuaded Pico to turn his back on sinful things – alluring knowledge and its close companion, seductive women.8 The biography lauds Pico’s knowledge of Christian and pagan authors, scholastic disputation, languages, and memory, but stresses that these virtues matter less than his willingness to burn his own “wanton” works of love poetry, and his dedication to scripture, his almsgiving, daily prayers, and self-flagellation. The

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Latin text simply explains that Pico burned his books for religious reasons, but More’s translation emphasizes the point that books are sinful by explaining further that they were “trifles” that might be the occasion for evil.9 Pico rightly valued knowledge acquired for “the love of God and profit of His church,” above “all his own knowledge of things natural and godly,” but proved his true virtue by placing even greater value on “the little affection of an old man or an old woman.”10 Moreover, in a key turning point, Pico encouraged his friends to seek God through love rather than knowledge, and announced that he would leave behind the world of scholarship, take up a cross, and wander barefoot preaching the word of God. The significance of this final choice is underscored by the frightening conclusion of the work, which describes how the apocalyptic Florentinian preacher, Savonarola, predicted that Pico would be engulfed in the flames of purgatory because he had died before fulfilling his vow to join a religious order. By translating Pico’s story, More exposes the dangers of worldly ambition and scholarly pride. Just as a Christian must learn to resist sexual temptation, so the scholar must reject the temptations of scholarship in order to move from the temporal to the eternal. Scripture alone contains the true word of God, and its knowledge is available only to those who read it to the exclusion of all else. This devotion will teach the student that love is better than knowledge, that God is best comprehended by the simple “affection” of an illiterate person, and that in the end even the most brilliant scholar is best served by leaving his books behind, taking up the cross, and following Christ.

revisiting the stories and finding community These stories, in which Erasmus celebrates knowledge and More privileges faith, suggest that Erasmus and More represent two ideal types: In one corner stands the self-assured intellectual who, for better or worse, made Christianity less ritualistic – more individualistic, more learned, more internal.11 Diagonally across from him crouches a figure gripped by intellectual doubt, convinced that faith and traditional acts of devotion must be valued above all forms of human knowledge. This typological contrast between optimism and pessimism, rationalism and fideism, has its problems, but anachronism is not one of them: These sorts of contrasts appealed to sixteenth-century thinkers no less than to modern scholars. And although we have freed ourselves of the simplistic idea that this was a classic case of forward-looking intellectuals battling against frightened fideists, a convincing new interpretation has not yet emerged.12 The most ambitious attempt to date, William Bouwsma’s Waning of the Renaissance, inverts the old teleology by arguing that

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intellectual optimism begat fideistic pessimism. Building on ideas first developed in his 1975 article, aptly titled “The Two Faces of Humanism,” Bouwsma argues that these two typological perspectives were dialectically related, and instead of a conflict between different intellectual camps, the two perspectives coexisted uneasily within individuals.13 This is certainly true in More and Erasmus’s cases. More, who echoed the Life of Pico’s denigration of knowledge and insisted – in opposition to Luther and other Protestants – that faith was a gift from God that necessitated submission to the church, also enthusiastically defended humanism and lampooned ignorant people. So, too, Erasmus – the famous champion of optimistic humanism – wrote The Praise of Folly and other works that mocked the hubris of those who claimed scholarly knowledge, and he averred that the philosophy of Christ could be known by the unlettered as well as the highly literate. Clearly we cannot understand the debates about faith and reason without recognizing that they were offered by people motivated by contradictory impulses. Yet Bouwsma’s complex analysis presumes a kind of dialectical inevitability – that intellectuals who develop certain ideas will then be struck by the problems with those ideas and react (or retreat) accordingly. This fails to address the question of what, besides the internal logic of ideas, motivated intellectuals. What led them to be simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic in these specific ways? The nub of the answer is contained in our two opening tales – which, though seemingly about knowledge, are actually about community. Like flakes in a snow-globe, the claims about learning and faith are mesmerizing swirls that draw our gaze into another world and offer the tantalizing spectre of a spiritual community of friends. The sixteenth-century men and women of letters who wanted to locate themselves in this sphere were not marginalized members of society, standing with their noses pressed against the glass; nevertheless, they felt that the world they were in was fraught with problems, and even as they navigated this privileged social context they sought to create another that more fully embodied their ideals of reason, faith, and religious community. Consider, for example, the character Magdalia. Erasmus modeled her after Margaret More Roper, a woman who was known among the literati not only as Thomas More’s well-educated daughter, but also as the translator of a work by Erasmus. Like Roper, her real-life counterpart, the fictional Magdalia is implicitly situated within a scholarly network. And she makes claims about how this community ought to look by arguing that scholarship is constitutive of emotional bonds with divine and human beings alike: “Bookishness,” she says, both brings her closer to other people – rendering her and her husband “dearer” to one another – and also prepares her for life after death. Moreover,

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her threat that women will take over where monks have failed is not a generalized claim to social inversion, but a specific assertion about which group can rightly claim the scholarly mantle. The women she cites – the More girls, the Pirckheimers, the Blarers, and the noblewomen in Spain and Italy “who can rival any man” – represent a social challenge because they are learned women. Their sex thereby underscores the claim that learning is the trump card; whether made up of men or women, the community of literati is on the verge of replacing monks and priests. Thus Magdalia’s climactic speech about how the world has been turned “topsy-turvy” juxtaposes two communities: hapless religious men versus properly spiritual men and women of letters.14 It may seem unsurprising that Erasmus used a female character to represent an ideal community, because women often were invoked to signify alterity or a world set apart from the humdrum concerns of daily life. But early modern Europeans assumed that it was men, not women, who were best equipped for friendship and other communal relations, and so Magdalia’s gender has multifaceted significance. When she says that women will take over where monks have failed, she emasculates the men she critiques by presenting them as even weaker than the weaker sex. She has a more specific symbolic function, too, because when she contends that scholarship engenders love in women as well as men, she displaces power from sex to knowledge. Thus she represents a gender-neutral learned community that was as spiritual as it was intellectual. With Magdalia, in other words, Erasmus illustrates that his ideal was not embodied in existing intellectual castes – whether in universities or among independent professional humanists – but would instead be fulfilled by those who combined religion and scholarship in the right way, in a community constituted by common religious commitments and affection rather than by professional degrees or official vows. By the same token, Erasmus’s celebration of a learned woman underscored that his ideal spiritual community was deeply intellectual. Magdalia was part of the literate elite. She did not limit herself to books in the vernacular, but read works in Latin and Greek “in order to converse daily with authors so numerous, so eloquent, so learned, so wise; with counselors so faithful.”15 In this way she claimed access not just (as was customary for women who could read) to devotional treatises or translated conduct books, but also to the knowledge gained from ancient authors and contemporary works alike – and thereby to the community that humanists believed transcended time and space. Erasmus the biblical scholar, who elsewhere affirmed that his vision encompassed all Christians by talking of his hope that “even the lowliest women” would read the gospels, did not here present Magdalia reading Scripture, but instead used her to articulate his conviction that traditional religious communities could

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be replaced by a different kind of specialized community, made up of elite women and men who pursued knowledge within the context of affective, spiritualized relationships.16 A similar concern with community suffuses More’s Life of Pico. More offered this work to a nun, Joyce Leigh, as an expression of friendship. Friends, he noted, are wont to give gifts that satisfy material needs, but “inasmuch as the love and friendship (amyte) of Christian folk should be rather spiritual (gostly) friendship than bodily . . . I . . . sent you such a present as may bear witness of my tender love and zeal for the happy continuance and gracious increase of virtue in your soul.” What he offered was, in effect, a third person whose life could serve as a model for her own. Implicitly likening the written record of Pico’s life to the life of a saint, More explained that the text would inspire the reader to despise “wordly vanity” and desire “heavenly felicity.”17 As a translator, More further reinforced the claim that the work served a hagiographic function by dividing the long Latin text into chapters, which turned the original biography into something more like a vernacular book of devotion.18 More’s alterations, however, underscore an apparent incongruity: This devotional text was about a scholar – a controversial scholar – not a saint. Pico was condemned when he was alive, and More makes the ending even more strikingly ambivalent than it was in the original Latin by omitting several paragraphs of pedantic commentary about the value of religious orders and authority and concluding instead with Savonarola’s dark visions of Pico’s place in purgatorial limbo. And even as the biography emphasized the problems of human knowledge, the drama in Pico’s story came from the tension between good and bad communities.19 Pico’s ideas, for example, were considered heretical because he had shared them with the wrong people – ambitious, greedy scholars and “common people” – instead of reserving them for those who would understand (the “secret communication of learned men”).20 The biography balances this affirmation of secrecy by insisting that Pico’s ideas had public, communal warrant from learned men, including celebrated doctors of theology. Moreover, intelligent people continued to gather around Pico even after he, chastened by the ecclesial condemnations, “turned his mind to Christ.” From Pico these followers learned that wit, memory, languages, and dedicated study could lead one to despise earthly things. Thus More translated the Life of Pico and gave it to a nun to convey a moralistic tale about intellectual pride; but in describing the gift as an act of friendship, and in choosing the life of a famous scholar rather than a traditional saint, or giving a devotional text, he also cross-pollinated traditional religious vocation, scholarly virtue, and friendship to create (at least the vision of) a new kind of religious community.

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a religious community of friends Erasmus and More emphasized the spiritual value of friendships and scholarship because they were seeking an alternative to the problems they perceived in the political and intellectual worlds they inhabited. Although they wrote passionately about the entire community of believers (what More called the Common Corps of Christendom21 ), their personal quest for salvation was tied closely to a more specialized kind of community and animated by the difficult problem of how to distinguish between the spiritual and the worldly – between ambition and worthy service, between literary fame and religious immortality, between true friendships and relationships based on mutual advantage. These distinctions were crucial – and elusive. “Why,” Erasmus asked in a memorable fit of frustration, “do we mix up together things which are so conflicting? Earthly and heavenly, highest and lowest, heathen and Christian, profane and sacred – why do we confuse them all?”22 In the adage “Make Haste Slowly” he commented that human society would be better if it followed the pattern of nature, and he blamed the absence of order on the “lack of distinctions between estates.”23 This is telling, because in a sense Erasmus and his friends were themselves destabilizing the existing structure of estates or social roles by insisting on the spiritual value of communities of friends and the work of pious scholarship done outside universities or monasteries. Unlike Erasmus, Thomas More was a husband and father who chose marriage over monasticism, but from within a patriarchal family structure he was engaged in the same process of rethinking the boundaries and nature of community. When he suggested, for example, that bonds of scholarship might replace bonds of kinship, he did not mean only that friends were more important than family, but also that his children and wife might be dearest to him insofar as they were learned friends. His children who are “dear to me by the law of nature” are “dearer by learning and virtue” and “most dear by such advancement in knowledge and good character.”24 As these quotes suggest, pious men of letters like More and Erasmus imagined that the bonds of learning might displace sexual differences – because these bonds established a religious community. More famously insisted that his daughters be educated in the same way as his son. He described his children, who were tutored in his home, as his school, and began a letter to them with this salutation: “A greeting from Thomas More to his whole School.” More’s “school” included not only his three daughters and one son, but also at least three other girls who were his wards or the daughters of family friends. His close attention to the details of his children’s education and his conviction that learning brings one closer to God are evident throughout his letters to his children’s tutor William Gonell, and to his daughter Margaret More

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Roper who, as we will discuss in more detail, was praised by literati and cited by those who thought women should be educated.25 Women who, like men, were highly educated in subjects ranging from classical liberal arts to medical science to the writings of Church Fathers will alike be prepared to live and die well. Thus, although More believed in a gendered hierarchy (he advised Margaret, for example, to “yield in everything” to her husband), this conviction could be displaced by his sense that learning trumps gender: In the same letter he gave his daughter “full leave” to equal or surpass her husband in knowledge.26 An “inner knowledge of what is right” should redirect attention to the salvation sought in and through the religious community of the learned – and thus free men and women alike from fidelity to convention. More elsewhere insists that the “reward of wisdom” does not depend “on the talk of men, than which nothing is more foolish or mischievous.”27 In contrasting wisdom to convention, More was putting learning in a privileged realm, otherwise occupied by his private religious practices, set off from the realm of public office and speech that, as Stephen Greenblatt and others have noted, made him feel all too starkly the tension about identity.28 More’s characterization of wisdom allows us also to nuance the transformation Laurence Manley sketches out when he observes that the “Renaissance witnessed a gradual displacement of the philosophic bias by a rhetorical one, and an increasingly frequent substitution of convention for nature as an adequate test of rectitude and fitness.”29 People troubled by convention did not necessarily turn back to philosophy; instead they also affirmed other notions of rectitude and fitness by envisioning themselves as part of alternative communities characterized by religious values. Consequently, even as More suggested that the connection between learning and holiness was not gendered, he insisted all the more strongly on communal boundaries – not conventional boundaries of gender, but distinctions between normative society and a special group of learned people who sought God in and with their friends.30 This claim that a specific kind of scholarly community was a kind of religious community led the literati to emphasize the differences between their own sodality and monasticism – a difference, they asserted, that was clear because of the commitment they had to friendship. More created a caustic dialogue to underscore that the relationship he claimed for Erasmus and their mutual friend Peter Gilles was the kind of brotherhood that monks did not enjoy – precisely because monks were not friends: Wishing to show two friends in little verses to be the greatest of mutual friends, I had said that they were such as Castor and Pollux once were. “Your comparison of brothers with friends is inept” rejoined a trifling monk ( fraterculus). “What,”

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I said, “Is there any closer kind of friendship than that between brothers?” My interlocutor laughed scornfully at such ignorance of the obvious on my part, and said, “In our large and crowded monastery there are more than two hundred brothers, but I wager you anything that amongst those two hundred you will not find two brothers who are mutual friends.”31

This was precisely Erasmus’s complaint. Erasmus thought that a scholarly community built upon the foundations of friendship and scholarship could rectify the problems he experienced in the monastery of the Augustinian Canons at Steyn, which he entered when only sixteen and left permanently (though without renouncing his vows) only four years later.32 Before he entered this monastery, Erasmus had been enrolled in a hostel school for poor boys run by the Brethren of the Common Life, a community of lay and ecclesial men who championed a life of prayer, penance, and seclusion from the sinful world. The Brethren, who nourished the style of spirituality known as the “new devotion” or devotio moderna, emphasized a practical asceticism and viewed intellectual curiosity as a sign of hubris. (As John Van Engen points out, this is not to say that the Brethren disavowed human knowledge entirely. They emphasized sapientia rather than scientia and argued that learning should be useful; they were teachers, readers, editors, and copiers at a time when most people in their social class were illiterate.)33 Thus although this spirituality influenced Erasmus’s notion of the philosophy of Christ, he said that the Brethren school he attended as a boy had taught him nothing; his withering critique of monasticism’s antiintellectualism also reflects his frustration with the Brethren’s lack of interest in making their religious community into a community of spiritual scholars.34 Years later Erasmus explained that he had been drawn to monasticism by a friend, but he found that monastic rules made friendships difficult, and “study was neither respected nor practiced.”35 This, he argued, violated the original spirit of religious life because intimate relationships and learning had been essential to the founders of religious orders: Benedict, Francis, or Augustine “had no other ambition than to live a life according to the teaching of the gospel, both in liberty and in spirit, with friends who joined them willingly.”36 His own experience in a monastery, however, convinced him that this early model had been thoroughly deformed, and he consequently came to believe that a monastic way of life offended his very being.37 Instead of simply repudiating monasticism, though, Erasmus tried to recreate a religious life outside the monastery. He insisted that intellectual work was a social endeavor that necessarily entailed the mutual possession of ideas among friends. In making this claim, he established that learning was the

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foundation of a communal way of life – outside the monastery, but infused with monasticism’s original religious inspiration. As Kathy Eden deftly explains in a book named after Erasmus’s adage, Friends Hold All Things in Common, Erasmus’s vision of common property emerged in tandem with his desire to take possession of a tradition of scholarship – of ideas and works from the past – and make it a living force of virtue in the present.38 But in thinking about a collective tradition of scholarship, Erasmus was also envisioning a new kind of community. Consequently, when Erasmus, the peripatetic scholar, used letters, visits, and the exchange of books, money, and recommendations to transform a European-wide network of scholars into the community he had failed to find among the canons, he described like-minded scholars as nostra ordo.39 In the modern English edition of Erasmus’s letters, this term is translated as “men of our way of thinking,” but as James Tracy points out, the more literal translation would refer to a traditional “order” or “estate” in the feudal sense of the term.40 The dual possibilities for translation underscore Erasmus’s claims to a distinctive communal identity for men who manifestly lacked an institutional affiliation, and reflect his conviction that a stable society is made up of clearly defined groups.41 The estate or order Erasmus sought for himself was religious. Associations between scholars, he said, were sacred and should be sanctified by a “holy pledge.”42 This equivalence between religious and scholarly vows is illustrated by a tale in the earliest biography of Erasmus: Soon after leaving the monastery, Erasmus got leave to go to Basel to get the complete works of Jerome by claiming that he intended to go to Rome to fulfill a vow.43 His transition from monastic life to scholarly life was both motivated and enabled by his emerging conviction that he could live out his vocation better as a scholar in the world than as a canon or monk in a monastery. More, too, thought of scholarship as a transmuted form of monasticism, and he viewed the search for God as inseparable from a community of friends. Thus he similarly praised Erasmus for embodying an alternative to monasticism. In a polemical letter to a monk who had attacked his friend, More argued that Erasmus is the true monk: “God will . . . prefer his eloquence to your silence, his silence to your prayers, his food to your fasting, his sleeping to your vigils.”44 In contrast to the misguided monastic innovation of singing saints’ hymns, More likened the effectiveness of Erasmus’s satirical Praise of Folly to solemn patristic prayers.45 Erasmus’s works were more valuable and influential than “anybody’s fastings or pious prayers” because they ignited readers’ souls and educated them in righteousness46 – a claim closely related to Erasmus’s own imperative: “Seek this alone, let this be your first and only goal and desire, that you let yourself be changed, drawn along, inspired and transformed in that

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which you teach.”47 The two men similarly suggest that scholarship is a way of life that not only engenders virtuous acts, but also comprises more holistically the process of becoming holy: Studies confer sanctity not just on actions but on being; and scholarship is a transformative act, carried out between friends and itself constitutive of a sacralized community.48 As this evidence suggests, Renaissance friendship was not – as it is sometimes described – merely a topos inherited from Cicero; it is better understood as a habitus, a practical virtue cultivated in and through one’s relationships with other learned people.49 Eden’s work in particular is enormously helpful in demonstrating how friendship was both the lens through which Erasmus viewed scholarship, and the raw material he used to rework notions of tradition and intellectual property. My own analysis differs from Eden’s in emphasizing how Erasmus was, in related ways, turning repeatedly to friendship to clarify questions about sanctity and salvation. Relational dynamics were key to exegetical and textual practices. Learning should involve friends, teachers, and books alike because, as I discuss in more detail later, there was the sense that the knowledge gained through these relational practices could purify the soul. Thus scholars, properly formed through their interactions with the right community – a community consisting of contemporary pious scholars mutually engaged with ancient texts, both pagan and Christian – can and should be guides for one another and the society at large.50 They function in this role by identifying and editing good sources, and by writing texts that will in turn help cleanse and purify readers. So Erasmus, who exhorted readers to go back to the sources and who dedicated himself to what he describes as an intensely difficult process of producing a good edition of Jerome’s works, also produced paraphrases of the books of the New Testament and celebrated the practice of gathering proverbial adages as encapsulations of philosophical wisdom and copia, or choice quotes from specific writers, as a way to know and possess wise authors.51 These genres and the dynamics of friendship are similar insofar as both are transforming diversity into a kind of salvific unity.52

to understand the pressures and uncertainties that provoked these men to seek out a different sort of community, it is helpful to linger over the years between 1516 and 1520, the years when More and Erasmus reached new heights of social prominence and, not coincidentally, began to describe each other in ways that reflected their ideal vision of a religious community. In 1519, some twenty years after first meeting More, Erasmus wrote a long laudatory letter about his younger contemporary – a letter in which

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he famously declared that More was a man “born for friendship.” According to Erasmus, More embodied all that one could want in that relationship, which should be valued above all others: “In a word, whoever desires a perfect example of true friendship, will seek it nowhere to better purpose than in More.”53 Some two years earlier, More wrote similarly effusive paeans to their friendship, describing the pleasure he took in knowing that Erasmus would create a “monument to our friendship” in writing, thereby ensuring that “distant posterity will remember me for my friendship with Erasmus.”54 In one sense More was wrong: He is famous still today as the author of Utopia and because he declared that he could not sign the oath affirming Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and the claim that the king, not the pope, was the head of the English church. His execution made him not only a Catholic martyr but a hero to all who believe he died rather than betray his beliefs. Erasmus, for his part, is known not only as an astonishingly prolific author of humanistic and religious texts, but also as the model for humanist inquiry. His visage and name are still used to invoke Renaissance values in high schools, academies, and scholarly conferences throughout Europe and North America. In another sense, though, More was correct to predict that the friendship between the two men would have its own allure, an appeal that might well give us pause given that what the relationship presents to us is a merger of grandiose claims about the association’s unique import and the absence of the kinds of psychological intimacy we now associate with friendship. The unfamiliar intensity of this sixteenth-century relationship is, however, precisely what draws us into the crucible of what religion meant to Catholic literati at the time.55 For example, More’s Utopia is really a book about a religious model of friendship. The values of equality promoted in Utopia are values “embodied wherever friends love each other” – a claim that echoed the 1515 edition of Erasmus’s adage, “Friends Hold All Things in Common.” As David Wootton argues, More’s vision is ultimately transgressive because it sets friendship in opposition to politics: The real political order was hierarchical (and necessarily so), but in the Renaissance, rulers governed through their friends. Consequently, the claim that friendship necessitated parity challenged this basic assumption that friendship and politics were compatible. Thus although it has often been noted that More dispensed with patronage in Utopia, Wootton’s thesis that More’s utopic society was based on ideals of friendship underscores that precisely what More sought in friendship was an alternative to politics. More thereby conflated friendship and Christianity: In More’s Utopia, there were many different religions and scriptures, and the institutional church had almost no role, but Christianity was nevertheless appealing, because of the

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communal way of life (Christianorum conventus) practiced in the early church. The book thereby emphasizes that the equality that characterized friendship was a Christian value.56 According to Wootton, by differentiating friendship and politics, More’s Utopia “promotes the modern idea that politics are impersonal.”57 Equally important, however, is the corresponding point that More was protesting the increasingly impersonal or bureaucratic nature of the realm he worked in. When More began to write Utopia in 1515, he was on a diplomatic mission for Henry VIII, and he saw the book through publication during months when, as he described it, he was under pressure to accede to Henry’s demand that he join the king’s council.58 (More accepted the position in the English court by the autumn of 1516, and remained in it until 1529, when he was appointed to the top post of Lord Chancellor, a position he resigned, under pressure, in 1532.) The king’s call to service was issued in affective rather than bureaucratic terms: He appealed to More’s loyalty and affection rather than to a claim that the office fit his credentials. The service More rendered, though, was bureaucratic as much as it was personal in the increasingly centralized and institutional English royal court.59 The pervasive power of impersonal, calculating relationships made More, like Erasmus, uneasy because of the gap between rhetoric and reality – between the claims that political and professional affiliations were personal and affective (which made relatively more sense in kinship-based feudal societies) and the lived reality that they were in fact primarily bureaucratic and professional instead. More’s rise to the powerful position of Lord Chancellor illustrates that, reluctantly or not, More played the political game well. Traditionally, More’s biographers have insisted that he did not want to join the court. Sixteenthand twentieth-century scholars alike have assumed that the question of More’s willingness speaks to whether he was distastefully ambitious or appropriately averse to power. Erasmus as well as More’s earliest biographer, his son-in-law William Roper, insisted he was reluctant. Less partisan scholars now generally agree that More not only accepted but actively jockeyed for the post because it was the next logical step in his public career.60 Still, the old debate is significant because it reminds us that this ambivalence was seen as important in More’s own day. Working for the king was more prestigious (if not more profitable) than the various positions he held as a lawyer in London, and More composed eloquent passages about how learned men were duty-bound to advise their kings.61 Nevertheless, More and Erasmus both claimed that he wanted nothing more than to sequester himself away from the sycophantic world of a royal courtier.62

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Even as More was entering the political power chambers it seems he was looking over his shoulder, wondering whether his major work, Utopia, would give him entrée to an alternative community by establishing his reputation as a scholar. Before 1515 he had written only a few poems, some epigrams, the translation of Pico’s Life that went largely unnoticed, translations of Lucian, and the unpublished History of King Richard III. Utopia, then, represented More’s serious bid for status in the world of letters.63 With Erasmus’s help, More ensured that it was issued by Froben, the best printing house on the continent, and that it was prefaced with admiring letters from leading scholars. All their efforts paid off: Utopia was one of the few books by an English writer that gained a significant audience among readers on the Continent; in its production no less than its content it testifies to More’s reluctance to be subsumed by his political role.64 Utopia itself encourages us to focus on the ambivalent relationships between scholarship and politics that shapes the narrative of More’s entry into royal service. The book opens with a dialogue that might well be read as a potential courtier’s version of Hamlet’s famous question, “To be or not to be?” The initial speaker is Peter Gilles (the classical scholar and city clerk More met through Erasmus) who begins by asking the character Raphael Hytholoday why he does not make himself useful by serving a king. To Raphael’s stern protest that he has no desire to “enslave” himself, Gilles responds by explaining, “I do not mean that you should be in servitude (servias) to any king, only in his service (inservias).” Raphael denies the significance of the distinction, and the reader might sympathize; it is, after all, as Raphael notes, “only a matter of one syllable.” Undeterred, Gilles insists on the importance of service: “I do not see any other way in which you can be so useful to your friends or to the general public, in addition to making yourself happier.” Raphael rejects the value of usefulness: “Would a way of life so absolutely repellent to my spirit make my life happier? As it is now, I live as I please, and I fancy very few courtiers, however splendid, can say that.”65 Instead, he proclaims that he should be faithful to his spiritual values – and to the value of freedom in particular. Near the end of Book I, after a more specific discussion with Gilles about how to advise kings, Raphael offers a new critique of courtiers by citing Plato’s argument that “wise men are right in keeping away from public business” because they “cannot remedy the folly of others.”66 The reader’s uncertainty about whether to use the first criterion (freedom) or the second (efficacy) is compounded by the fact that the subject is abruptly dropped. Book II commences with a quite different discussion about life in Utopia. The work thus points beyond the very question it poses about the desirability of political

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life. In doing so it reminds us that More’s own decision about being a courtier provoked him to seek a different sort of community in real life, just as he created one in his book. More’s interest in presenting Utopia to the scholarly community suggests a strong desire to associate himself with a social sphere distinct from court life. So, too, the work’s insistence on equality and friendship reflects More’s vision of a network of relationships characterized by spiritually sanctioned parity rather than status – a message further reinforced by the fact that Raphael Hytholoday, the man who speaks out against the social systems of patronage and political power, bears the name of a guiding, healing archangel.

the ambivalence about being in thrall to increasingly imper sonal professional and political systems also pervades Erasmus’s work. After leaving the monastery of the Augustinian canons regular, probably in 1493, Erasmus spent a couple of years as secretary to the bishop of Cambrai, and in 1516 he accepted a largely honorary position in the privy council of the sixteen-year-old boy who became Emperor Charles V.67 Apart from these positions, he pursued patrons and their support in more ad hoc ways, and in Praise of Folly (1511) he memorably ranted against royal counselors and the dangers of flattery: “Now what shall I say about the noble courtiers? Nothing is more venal, more servile, more witless, or more contemptible than most of them.”68 And fair enough, Erasmus’s Folly suggests, because most rulers “grant no hearing to anyone unless he knows how to speak pleasant things.”69 This is of course the same man who wrote and published many words of counsel, usually couched in effusive flattery, including the Education of a Christian Prince, which he wrote for Charles soon after receiving his appointment in 1516. Yet despite the fact that the work was a service offered in exchange for a gift received, Erasmus claimed that he had not fallen prey to the dangers of dependence. Thus he introduced the work with a curious mix of flattering deference and pride: “Although I knew that your Highness had no need of any man’s advice, least of all mine, I had the idea of setting forth the ideal of a perfect prince for the general good, but under your name.” Erasmus thereby partially disavows ownership of his own ideas, explaining that “this serves a double purpose: under your name this useful work will penetrate everywhere, and by these first fruits I, who am already your servant, can give some kind of witness to my devotion for you.”70 He reclaims a more independent role by differentiating himself from Isocrates, the pagan advisor on whose work he modeled his own, because Isocrates was merely “a sophist, instructing some

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petty king or rather tyrant, and both were pagans,” whereas “I am a theologian addressing a renowned and upright prince, Christians both of us.” In contrast with paganism, Christianity equalizes the relationship between a ruler and his wise counselor. Erasmus claims this equality even as he acknowledges that it is elusive. For example, he acknowledges that if “I were writing for an older prince, I might perhaps be suspected by some people of adulation or impertinence.” He judges himself free of this suspicion only because his prince is not yet old enough to inspire either. Erasmus “consequently” declares himself a man with pure motives who “cannot be thought to have had any purpose but the common good, which should be the sole aim both of kings and of their friends and servants.” The assertion of integrity was tenuous but crucial, because without it Erasmus perceived himself adrift in a world of values that he wanted to reject. At the end of his dedicatory letter, Erasmus’s view of patronage curved back like a sine wave toward the axis, with the closing observation that he claims independence not for himself but on behalf of Charles, for “it will be no small part of your reputation that Charles was a prince to whom a man need not hesitate to offer the picture of a true and upright Christian prince without any flattery.”71 The undulating logic of this prefatory letter thereby underscores Erasmus’s lack of enthusiasm about patronage and its relations of dependence. It is often said that Erasmus was the first European writer to live off his pen, but he was still heavily reliant on gifts from patrons and admirers,72 and even as he pinpointed calculating praise as the venal offense of a dependent courtier, he knew well how to promote himself and his work by flattering those who could support it. This is not surprising – Erasmus would otherwise have lived and written in obscurity – but it is important because Erasmus himself was bothered by the contradiction. Some recent studies argue that Erasmus embraced the status game, and tried to win it by exalting the learned community – by transferring, as Eden puts it, “preeminence from politics to scholarship.”73 Yet Erasmus’s work of advice to a Christian prince – written in 1516, the same year More decided to become a courtier and Erasmus aided his entry into the scholarly community by facilitating the publication of Utopia – suggests that Erasmus’s ambivalence was not resolved simply by claiming that the learned community was the superior source of status. Instead what he wanted was an alternative to status – to the public worlds of politics and scholarship alike. This desire to align himself with a realm defined by different values was subtle but persistent – not an overwhelming impetus to total withdrawal, but a pervasive, largely inchoate wish to be part of a community that was oriented toward the sacred rather than the profane.

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Erasmus’s longing to inhabit a community defined by nonutilitarian values is evident also in the fact that in Education of a Christian Prince, as in other works written between 1515 and 1517, Erasmus extolled an ideal of peace that was scarcely grounded in a cogent analysis of political power. As the editor of the modern English edition observes, this work reads “more like a euphoric projection of a dream than a serious programme for political education.” This is not to say that Erasmus was an idealistic pacifist. In Education of a Christian Prince he described the conditions under which a ruler should wage war, but at the same time, in response to decades of conflict between European powers, including the pope, he became more ardent about the ideal of a conflict-free world.74 As evidence that this was an evolving concern, we can look to the fact that his emphatic message about the importance of peace was largely absent from early works such as the Enchiridion (first published in 1503). Moreover, he expanded his entry on the adage “Dulce bellum” in the 1515 edition of his Adages, and in writing Complaint of Peace in 1516 he took a request from Jean le Sauvage, the chancellor of Burgundy and Castille, to write something in support of a policy of appeasement with France as license to argue that Christ’s central message was the transvaluation of power into peace: “Because [Christ] knew that peace could not be established where there is rivalry for office, fame, wealth, and vengeance, he removed these passions completely from the hearts of his people.” Erasmus explains that political leaders should thus hold themselves to this unworldly standard: “I call on you, princes, on whose assent especially the affairs of the world depend, who bear amongst men the image of Christ the Prince: heed the voice of your King, who summons you to peace.”75 Like many of his contemporaries, Erasmus followed war news closely but largely from afar, and arguably war affected him most deeply as a sobering reminder that his relationships with patrons he sought to influence – with kings, bishops, councilors, and even the pope – were suspended within a web of destructive, impersonal forces he was powerless to control.76 War cast into relief the differences between society as a whole and the scholarly community, where no blood was shed and where Erasmus, the man who coordinated publications, alliances, and reputations alike, had significant control. But the Republic of Letters was, nevertheless, a sphere riven with conflict and pervaded by ambition. Erasmus interpreted the disputes among people who knew each other well – and theoretically shared a commitment to knowledge – as a particularly acute symptom of the epidemic of discord that made the fulfillment of Christian ideals impossible. In his preface to the 1518 edition of the Enchiridion, Erasmus intensified the connection between peace and his vision of a good Christian life with the exasperated suggestion

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that scholarly rivalries were a major impediment to peace with the Turks who might, he observes, be converted peacefully if scholars could demonstrate harmony and concord amongst themselves.77 This lofty assertion of scholarly influence was an expression of Erasmus’s own ambitious desire to funnel social as well as religious power to learned men. It was also, however, a sign that he was unhappy not only with the impersonal relationships that prevailed in the realm of politics and patrons, especially under the pressure of war, but also that he disliked the rivalries that split the scholarly community into different camps and challenged his belief that the community could embody Christian values of unity, peace, and unselfish fellowship. Instead, like the political world of which it was a part, the scholarly community was roiled with controversies, as Erasmus knew all too well because he instigated many of them in the course of shoring up his own reputation and garnering social esteem for his brand of humanistic scholarship. The 1511 work Praise of Folly was critiqued by university theologians at Louvain, and in 1516 More informed him that many were sharpening their knives even in advance of the publication of Erasmus’s critical edition of the New Testament.78 However skillfully Erasmus turned these controversies to his own advantage (and Lisa Jardine has proven that he did so remarkably well), there are signs that this contentious work left him uneasy about his own investment in status. We can open the pages of Erasmus’s letters almost at random and find him calculating money and prestige, evaluating slights and compliments, all the while perceiving himself as one who is satisfied with his humble lot, pleased with whatever recognition he receives, and above all happy to be independent. Just as he does what is necessary to garner support from patrons, so in the same way he keeps his hand hovering over the flame of his own prestige, anxiously stoking the fire or reporting on its heat, even as he denied being attracted to its warmth: “Ambition I always abhorred, and now slightly regret this; one should accept in the way of office enough to prevent other men from looking down on one.”79 This admission – from a letter written in 1523 by a man who (well into his fifties) was both renowned and controversial among learned types throughout Europe, financially affluent and, though sickly, strong enough to live nearly fifteen more years – is a telling glance backward that betrays Erasmus’s persistent frustration that it was so difficult to live according to the values he held dear. Thus in 1520 an exasperated Erasmus wrote to his friend More that he wanted to practice Christian humility but found it difficult because others would interpret this stance as an expression of “cowardice or fear.”80 This outburst against his fellow scholars reflects Erasmus’s conviction that they too often simply mirrored prevalent social values instead of shunning

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ambition and manifesting Christian ideals of concord or generosity.81 As he wrote to a learned archbishop in 1519, “Whoever is concerned with the business of faith (fidei negotium) ought to be far removed from every taint or appearance (specie) of ambition, self-advantage, hatred, or revenge.”82 The terms he used in this piece of advice point up clearly the difficulty involved in trying to differentiate the world guided by faith from the world of ambition: In traditional discussions about the merits of religious life, negotium (active life in the world) was contrasted with otium (the contemplative life) and thus in this letter he tries to assert that negotium can still be possessed by faith without falling prey to the calculations of appearance and advantage that life in the world necessitates. Erasmus has to confront this problem because, as Nancy Struever points out, he took the model of friendship developed by earlier humanists and tried to apply it to a much larger network of fellow scholars – thereby “overextend[ing] the construct amicitia as a model for intellectual community.”83

for erasmus this created an often disturbing mixture of pro fane and spiritual relationships – a disturbance we can see him trying to address through his friendship with More. Erasmus was not just trying to build a virtual academic empire with himself at its head; he was also trying to reconcile the conflict he experienced between aspirations for prestige and influence and his ideals of Christian amity, peace, and equality. By openly disparaging More’s role as a royal counselor – as he did for years – and then just as eloquently recasting his friend’s relationship to political power, Erasmus used More both to represent the problem and to envision a solution. In 1518, nearly two years after More accepted the position, Erasmus wrote, “More is wholly a courtier (totus est aulicus), always attending to the king, to whom he is now secretary.” Courtiers, aulici, were the simpering agents of royal power whom Erasmus memorably disparaged in Praise of Folly, the work which, seven years earlier, he dedicated to More as a friend who both appreciated Erasmus’s humor and shared his conviction (or so Erasmus implied by the very act of dedicating the work to his friend) that social climbers, aloof scholars, cruel princes, and all other transgressors should be mocked. But the category of men Erasmus ridiculed in Praise of Folly with an arch tone – conveyed by capitalizing the simple adjective “high” (Proceribus) so that the sarcasm of the Folly’s introductory sentence, Jam quid de Proceribus aulicis commemorem, might be conveyed by rendering “What then shall I say about those lofty courtiers” as if said with a roll of the eyes – was now used in all seriousness to describe More.84 It was a sharp barb. And to More himself

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Erasmus asserted incontrovertibly that they were now in separate worlds: “As for your being hailed to court, I have only one consolation, that you will serve under an excellent king . . . [for] you are certainly lost to literature, and to us.”85 Political service may be valuable but it is opposed to the life of scholarship, and if Erasmus claims consolation he still denies the possibility of restoration. More himself claimed to fear this possibility: “I admire your conviction that you do not want to become implicated or entangled in the nonsensical business of princes, and you show clearly your love for me in your hope that I might extricate myself, for you can scarcely believe how unwillingly I engage in it.”86 But More proceeded nevertheless to embroil himself in the business of princes; and when Erasmus set out to reclaim More, to describe him not as a courtier through and through but as one who was detached from political maneuvering and thoroughly committed to values that courts opposed, he did not simply mimic his friend’s self-presentation. Instead, Erasmus inscribed a distinct persona for More and, in the process, exposed his own yearning for a community set apart from scholarly and political worlds alike. So in 1519, in a letter to Ulrich von Hutten that is widely cited as a canonical description of More, Erasmus modifies his earlier judgment. He does not unequivocally clear More of the courtier’s taint: By saying that More “formerly” disliked court life and the friendship of princes, Erasmus leaves open the possibility that this judgment might change yet again. But piece by piece he builds a case for More as one whose ultimate commitments are where Erasmus yearns to put his own, in divine ideals manifested in a specific kind of relationship, and specifically in friendships that reject the lure of ambition in favor of a shared love for religiously valuable scholarship. Thus Erasmus says that More’s antipathy toward courts was rooted in his “special hatred of absolute rule and a corresponding love for equality.” According to Erasmus, More stands aloof from the crass world of calculations and negotiations, like a “philosopher who strolled unthinking through the marketplace watching the crowds of people buying and selling.” But More’s detachment opens him to a different sort of intimacy (“nobody is less swayed by public opinion and yet nobody is closer to the feelings of ordinary men”), an intimacy rooted in the rejection of superficial social judgments. Erasmus presents More’s love for his friends as a repudiation of self-protection and self-interest, explaining that More neglects his own affairs in order to attend to the needs of his friends, that More has no fear of that “plethora of friendship that Hesiod warns us against,” and that in the choice of friends “he is never difficult to please, in keeping up with them the most compliant of men, and in retaining them the most unfailing.”87

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Erasmus therefore claims that insofar as he embraces friendship, More takes up a different standard of value; when More “finds open-hearted people naturally suited to him he enjoys their company and conversation so much that one would think he reckoned such things the chief pleasure in life.”88 The conditional voice used in this final description, where the English phrase “one would think” translates the impersonal subjunctive construction ut . . . ponere videatur, seems designed to convey a momentary sense of doubt – for where then did More think true pleasure lay, if not in discussions with sympathetic souls? The most obvious answer is that More valued above all his solitary devotions to God in contemplation, study, and prayer. To be sure, Erasmus’s More took time to pray alone, and kept this practice up even at court. In doing so, Erasmus declares, he provides a retort to anyone who thinks “Christians are not to be found except in monasteries.”89 But in fact the subjunctive equivocation seems instead to signify the uncertainty that holds Erasmus’s attention – and the point he wants to affirm about the value of certain kinds of sociability. Once in judging More “lost to literature and to us,” and now in conceding that things are not as bad as he’d feared (“amidst such masses of business he does not forget his old and ordinary friends, and returns to his beloved literature from time to time”),90 Erasmus emphasizes that friendship and scholarship together distinguish that which gives true pleasure from that which only appears to be meaningful. It is not, however, easy to adjudicate between superficial appeal and true meaning. Erasmus and More see scholarship as truly valuable, but it is also a guarantor of status in the world of business, politics, and patronage. And so, to broaden the fine line between worldly and spiritual scholarship, Erasmus speaks disparagingly about More’s studies in the law, which “as a profession has little in common with literature truly so called” and is pursued by those who are interested above all in acquiring for themselves a top spot on the social ladder, for “in England those who have made themselves authorities in that subject are in the first ranks for eminence and distinction.”91 Although Erasmus observes that it is consequently no surprise More chose to study the law, he hastens to demonstrate that More remained simultaneously committed to a different kind of scholarly prestige by explaining that as an adolescent More’s nature “swerved away from the law” and he devoted himself also to studying patristic authors. In this way, Erasmus assures his readers, More acquired a subtly different sort of approbation from those who heard him lecture on the City of God; “Priests and old men were not ashamed to seek instruction in holy things from a young man, or a layman (a iuvene prophano) or sorry that they had done it.”92 More lived in the profane world, but by the same token he showed that this need not be an impediment to focusing on

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“holy things.” So Erasmus suggests that the difference between social prestige (and studies pursued with this end in mind) and scholarly religious eminence is akin to the distinction between selfish or hierarchical relationships pursued for personal advantage and friendships based on equality and affirmed by acts of generosity. Erasmus uses female characters to reinforce this distinction between pragmatic calculations and communal ideals, just as we saw him do in the opening colloquy about the abbot and Magdalia. More proved himself a man set apart even during the phase of his life when “he was not averse to affairs with young women” because he was “attracted by the mingling of minds rather than bodies.”93 The parallel construction in the Latin original, which juxtaposes animus and coitus (animo mutuo caperetur potius quam coitu) similarly implies a transposition of sensuality, so that More is presented here both as remarkable for being able to think of something besides sex, and appealing because he mingles with women on a spiritual plane – on the level, in other words, where male interactions ought to occur. By Erasmus’s account, More originally intended to take religious vows; he “applied his whole mind to the pursuit of piety, with vigils and fasts and prayer and similar exercises preparing himself for the priesthood.” But he couldn’t shake off the desire to get married, so he chose a wife whom he could educate – “an unmarried girl, who was still very young . . . which gave him the more opportunity to mould her character to match his own. He arranged for her education and made her skilled in music of every kind.” More’s pedagogic efforts “almost succeeded in making her a person with whom he would gladly have shared his whole life,” and were it not for his wife’s untimely death, she might have become the kind of companion he and Erasmus sought among their learned friends.94 Thus instead of simply attributing More’s decision not to enter a monastery to a young man’s inability to be celibate, Erasmus emphasizes that More was guided by his desire for a certain kind of relationship – much as Erasmus stressed that it was his own desire for good scholarly friendships that led him away from the life of an Augustinian canon. By the same token, Erasmus glorifies More for educating his daughters with his son, and although the ideal of equality is nowhere to be found in Erasmus’s descriptions of More’s relationships with either of his wives or his daughters, the impression that these women are More’s creations – molded (fingere) or shaped by More and in that sense works of artifice – is mitigated somewhat by Erasmus’s contention that More’s success could be measured by the fact that his daughters have freed themselves from the female tendency to be deceived by appearances, by the artifice of speech or manners, and are able instead

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to discern meaning and message.95 Finally, although chastity remains the unquestioned measure of whether education is good or bad for women, there is, in Erasmus’s and More’s work alike, a strong emphasis on how education creates the basis for a different kind of relationship for men and women. In the dedication to the Life of Pico, More addresses Joyce Leigh as friend – a word not easily extended by men to women, laden as it was with classical connotations of equality and similitude.96 Similarly, in his description of More’s wife as well as in other writings – including the colloquy quoted at the beginning of this chapter – Erasmus promotes the idea that marriage should be a bond between two educated minds. Clearly these gestures toward a notion of companionate marriage are not visions of equality or even movements toward meaningful equity. Erasmus and More’s pictures of heterosociability are symptomatic rather than prescriptive – but as Barbara Correll suggests in her study about how humanists valorized women in order to ameliorate their own concerns about ambition, they are significant nevertheless because they register elite men’s uneasiness about the social hierarchy that privileged them.97 For the same reason, although Erasmus and More both aspired to elite status, Erasmus’s portrayal of More as a man for all seasons,98 a man at the zenith of the social order, is subtly subversive. On the one hand, More proves that elite scholarship is valuable in all possible ways, a point Erasmus sums up in a nearly laughable list of benefits: “[More] says he owes to his literary studies his much better health, his popularity and influence with an excellent prince and all men both friends and strangers, his easier circumstances, his own greater happiness and the happiness he gives his friends, the services he can now render to his country and his relations and kinsfolk, his increased acceptability to court society, to life among the nobility, and to the whole way of life that he now leads, and a greater ease in pleasing heaven.”99 This blithe conflation of earthly and heavenly rewards, of health, status, happiness, and salvation, stands at odds with Erasmus’s frequent pronouncements about the need to distinguish the sacred from the profane and to uphold spiritual ideals by shunning ambition. And so on the other hand, although it is clear that this image of More and scholarship appeals to Erasmus, his use of the adage “a man for all seasons” is not a straightforward endorsement of this synthesis. For example, Erasmus first used this adage to describe More this way in the preface to Praise of Folly, a work that mocked any and all who presumed to think they had figured out how to live in this world. Erasmus does not satirize More (or anyone else) personally, but the work indicts all conventional, self-satisfied modes of living and the worldly calculations that lead people to curry favor by adapting their words, their dress, and their ideas as necessary. In this context, the references to More’s ability to turn

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all things to good ends has an ironic undertone – a subtly condemnatory comment on More’s ability to please everyone. The only sure escape from the attractions of self-love and self-delusion is a kind of frenzied abandonment that defies convention. Erasmus offers this in the concluding paragraphs of the Praise of Folly and invokes it again in his short entry for the adage where he celebrates the philosopher Aristippus as a model “who danced with the rest in the purple worn by women.” Erasmus emphasizes that this behavior was shocking, and “Plato objected, adding that even in Bacchanalia one should behave with modesty,” but he cites the cross-dressing dancer all the same.100 In his description of More this lively transgression is transmuted – instead of appearing in drag he shares books and ideas with the opposite sex – but the aura of unconventionality lingers. Erasmus’s longing to picture More as a gateway to alterity rather than convention may explain his otherwise puzzling reluctance to give More’s scholarship lavish praise. Richard Marius observes that Erasmus “seemed to want to put some distance between himself and More’s work” because he did not, for example, write a prefatory letter for the 1516 edition of Utopia (which Marius describes as an “astounding” omission); in the preface he finally did write for the 1518 edition of More’s work, the effusive Erasmus nearly avoids talking about More altogether. The letter, addressed to the printer, says, “Such is the reputation of your press that, if it is known that a book has come from the house of Froben, that is enough to have it please the learned world.” True, Erasmus energetically took up the task of arranging to have the book printed and soliciting prefatory letters, but his support was in some sense lukewarm: As he explained to Peter Gilles, “I am getting the Nowhere [Nusquama, the original name for Utopia] ready; mind you send me a preface, but addressed to someone other than me, Busleyden for choice. In everything else I will act as a friend should.”101 Marius concludes that “nothing, apparently, could persuade [Erasmus] to be uncompromisingly favorable to the work of his friend.”102 This is the same ambivalence that shades Erasmus’s treatment of More’s role as a courtier, and it suggests that Erasmus wanted his friend to be a friend – not a successful advisor, not even a professional colleague, but the representative of a world of friends and friendship that was characterized by spiritual values of selflessness, equality, and concord rather than utilitarian calculations of advantage, self-interest, and status.

as we have seen, erasmus projected his own ambivalence onto More when he suggested that More’s prominent position at court violated their ideals about what a good scholar should do, and in recasting More

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as a reluctant courtier, Erasmus sharpened the answer he proposed for himself – the vision of scholarly life as a discrete sphere, a spiritualized alternative within the profane world. But the role Erasmus played in More’s life was a bit different. Erasmus was a key source of professional prestige, a powerful patron in the scholarly world where More had few credentials, and also the vocal champion of an idealized version of this same community. Thus, from More’s perspective Erasmus represented the possibility that realms of status and spiritual value could be one and the same. Especially during the early years of his royal service, before heresy and the king’s divorce took most of his attention, More unabashedly pursued both simultaneously. Although More and Erasmus met and may well have begun to consider themselves friends in 1499, the first surviving letter from More to Erasmus dates from 1516, the year that More finished Utopia, and it is, as Marc’hadour observes about their entire correspondence, “strikingly secular.”103 Most of the letter deals with tasks each should do to help one another acquire prestige and money, and in September of the same year, More explicitly enlisted Erasmus to manage the scholarly reputation he thought Utopia and his other writings could garner him. Referring to Utopia by its original title, More asserts common ownership with a plural possessive, “I send you our book Nowhere (Nusquamam nostram),” and demands Erasmus’s help: “You must do what you can for it.”104 The imperative request is followed by pragmatic details. As requested, More had delivered one of Erasmus’s letters to the Venetian ambassador, passed along some money Erasmus had deposited with him, and was certain that the archbishop of York, who had praised Erasmus lavishly, would “match those splendid words with action . . . both soon and generously.”105 Then More brought up his own work and appealed to Erasmus to prune out any that might reflect badly on More, either by giving offense to a fellow humanist or by exposing More’s intellectual inadequacy. Claiming to rely on Erasmus for both taste and brains, More concludes by proffering a shared ownership that, he insists, should redound to his own benefit: Deal with these epigrams “as you may think will be best for me.”106 Erasmus responds with the same assumptions, reassuring More that “your Island [Utopia] and all other things, they shall be taken care of,” and appending a notice of the encouraging fact that Peter Gilles is “delighted” with More’s book.107 In a subsequent letter, More gives a sigh of relief and expresses the plaintive hope that other esteemed men might follow suit: “I am delighted to hear that Peter approves of my Nusquama; if men such as he like it, I shall begin to like it myself. I should like to know whether Tunstall approves, and Busleyden, and your chancellor; that it should win their approval is more than I dared hope, being men so gifted that they hold high office in their own

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countries.”108 Months later, More still portrayed himself as someone who lived at a fever pitch of hopeful expectation that his book would be well received: “I had a letter the other day from Tunstall, full of the most friendly feeling; I promise you, his opinion of my republic, so frank and favorable, cheered me more, dearest Erasmus, than a nugget of pure gold.” This invocation of gold can, of course, be interpreted either as a message that money is in fact the measure of all things, or that the commodity being measured represents a separate system of value. More’s own meaning equivocates between these two possibilities, as we can see in his subsequent description of how the approval changed his sense of self: “So you can’t think now how I fancy myself; I have grown taller, I hold my head higher, for I have before my eyes the perpetual office of prince which my Utopians are planning to confer on me.”109 This sardonic vision of a man growing in stature conveys a heartfelt if unfulfilled desire to have another sort of status, measured by scholarly achievement rather than proximity to political power. More’s dream about being prince of Utopia alludes to religion by noting that he was in a Franciscan robe as he waited expectantly to be crowned – not by the precious jewels or gold that Utopians spurned, but by a diadem of cornears.110 As an established order of mendicant friars, the Franciscans were as vulnerable to mockery as any other religious order in the sixteenth century, but the ideal of apostolic poverty that had originally inspired the movement seems to cling to the Franciscan robe More describes himself wearing, especially because he pairs it with a reference to the Utopians’ repudiation of money. Reinforced by these references to a religious ideal, More’s self-mocking tone carries a whiff of uneasiness about any kind of secular glory, not just political but also scholarly. Months earlier, when he first asked Erasmus to see his works through print, More inserted a short but telling account of his encounter with a prominent humanist and court poet, Pietro Carmeliano, whom More described as a man intent on making himself look good. He “has performed the task of reading almost all the writers of fashionable disputations, to which he allows so much importance that even Dorp could not allow more.” Here More is less concerned with Carmeliano’s commitment to scholasticism than with the fact that in their encounter Carmeliano and More both treated knowledge as cultural capital in a performative exchange: “We had a full-dress discussion, each scratching the other’s back with formal speeches and long panegyrics.”111 With this More conveys his willingness and ability to perform as necessary. But he also repudiates the importance of this performance and upholds instead a standard of spiritual rectitude that he would like to think he values more highly: “Seriously, however, I like him thoroughly, he seems to me a man of real integrity, very learned and now most devoted to research in the Scriptures

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40 ERASMUS, CONTARINI, AND THE RELIGIOUS REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

(divinarum cognitioni).”112 Though keenly aware that what scholars did was often about prestige and profit, More wanted to believe that they served a higher calling. The centrality of friendship to this idealistic vision is demonstrated in the climax of his dream of being prince of Utopia. Thus in the dream his capacity to create, through the written word, an ideal human republic made him feel that he had been raised by God to a “sublime elevation,” and it is precisely at that exalted vantage point that he affirmed the importance of his friendships: “Although it has pleased heaven to raise my humble self to my present sublime elevation, with which I think no monarch’s place is to be compared, yet you will never find me forgetful of the old and tried relationship which I enjoyed with you when I was a private citizen.”113 His dream of glory is at the same time a religious vision that reflects More’s conviction that the ties that bind him to others – the ties of scholarly work and approbation – give him a community and enable his ascent to God. This tension between status and pure values tempers More’s delight about being praised by learned men. Consequently his claim that their approval “is more than I dared hope from men in high offices” is followed by speculation about their motives that threatens to undermine the value of their judgment. “Their approval is more than I dared hope . . . unless they were to favor it because in such a polity I have invented men like themselves.”114 More thereby suggests that it is impossible to know whether the men who showered him with praise did so because they relished power and influence or because they were disinterested lovers of knowledge who craved equality. More reassures himself with a general paean to prominent intellectuals: “Cultivated and upright [men] would certainly be at the head, whereas in their own countries, however great they may be (and great men they surely are), they always have to suffer great good-for-nothings as their equals – not to say superiors – in power and influence. For I do not believe men of their kind are moved by the thought that they will not have many people under them, many subjects, as kings now call their peoples (something, that is, worse than slaves).”115 With this final assurance that their motives are good, More acknowledges again the possibility that they are not. Moreover, he hedges his bets with the claim that he has not been corrupted by the worldly standards that might distort their judgment: “But if the opposite way of thinking is deeply implanted in them by their own success, your vote will be more than enough for my judgment.” Citing from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, More declares that he and Erasmus together can define their own values: “We are together, you and I, a crowd; that is my feeling, and I think I could live happily with you in any wilderness.”116 This rhetorical flourish serves at the end of the letter like a

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beacon of hope. More created a problem for himself by suggesting that the satisfaction he took in learned men’s approval was contingent on their motives for offering it, but here he illuminates an answer by insisting that approval from friends is all that really matters.

during the same period more threw himself into defending Erasmus’s prestige in a series of letters that grappled with the underlying question about the relationship between friendship and status. Between 1515, when he began to write Utopia while on a diplomatic mission to Flanders, and 1519, when he became increasingly absorbed by the Lutheran controversy, More wrote four letter treatises that appear together in the modern edition of More’s works under the title In Defense of Humanism. All four, the Letter to Dorp (1515), the Letter to Oxford (1518), and the Letter to Lee and Letter to a Monk (both 1519), were prompted by attacks on Erasmus. More’s willingness to take up his friend’s cause was, like his Utopia, a sign of his desire to stake a claim in the scholarly community. The intraprofessional debate More took up in these letters encompassed not only the obvious rivalry between humanists and scholastics, but also the claims and counterclaims about which types of educated men were mere artisans, with a flawed or inadequate understanding of what knowledge should entail, and which were true scholars who possessed and transmitted meaningful ideas. Throughout these works, in other words, More was less concerned with the content of the arguments than with the intertwined issues of scholarly identity and friendship. Thus even as he insisted that the arguments against Erasmus were intellectually fallacious, he condemned them as personal attacks and insisted that it was the judgment of friends and not professional colleagues that he and Erasmus ultimately cared about. In his letter to Edward Lee, More agrees with Lee’s anxious claim that they are friends, but insists that the line between friend and colleague is one that Lee has come perilously close to crossing, and that if he does – if he treats Erasmus as an academic colleague – Erasmus will take that as license to eviscerate Lee’s claims to academic status by exposing the weakness of his scholarship.117 In the letter to Dorp, More insisted that the transgressions were not just professional but also, and more consequentially, personal. Dorp’s arguments, even his act of demoting Erasmus from theologian to grammarian, is not as troubling as his derisive and confrontational tone. (More accused Dorp of “attacking Erasmus in a manner that is not at all becoming to you or him.”) This problem, according to More, is a sign that Dorp has transgressed by acting out of professional self-interest – as one who is greedy about his own reputation.118

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During the years when he was most deeply invested in professional prestige and seeking to align himself as much with scholars as with political power brokers, More sought something else, something not tainted by greed, ambition, or the lust for power. The world of scholars contained tantalizing hints of these pure spiritual values, flitting in and out of view, like a dream too easily ruptured by the demands of public life. More’s self-described dream about how the acclaim of other scholars raised his stature and made him feel like a prince of Utopia ends on a regretful note: “I hoped to continue this delicious dream a little longer but alas the dawning sun shattered it, turned me out of my princedom, and recalled me to my treadmill in the marketplace (forum).”119

scholarship as religious praxis Thomas More spent many nighttime hours awake and alone, hoping that prayer and religious study would grant him refuge from the demands that the rising sun revealed. He customarily rose at two in the morning to read and pray in solitude and, although he ensured that the house in Chelsea he built in 1525 had a clear view of London – his place of business – he also made his home, quite literally, a retreat by constructing a library and private chapel alongside his house. His son-in-law and first biographer, William Roper, reports that he regularly flagellated himself, probably during the solitary hours of prayer, and during the day he wore a hairshirt concealed under his clothes. But these vivid somatic details can overwhelm the fact that his less dramatic practices of reading, writing, and learning were also devotional acts.120 As More said in a 1517 letter to William Warham (c. 1447–1532), who had recently relinquished the Chancellorship, a man without public office was enviable because he could spend all his time on his studies in literature and philosophy, the best possible life of leisure, “in which you are able to live for yourself and for God.” More’s letter to Warham was itself a delicate act of public showmanship that alternately lauded the honor and dignity of Warham’s high office and declaimed the superiority of the “modesty,” “unworldliness,” and “good fortune” Warham exemplified by resigning it. Even as More showcased his own skill in a world of “secular affairs” and the “bustle of courts,” he emphasized that this was not what he valued by declaring he was “oppressed” by his own legal and political work and distraught that they deprived him of any free time.121 If public life was blighted by ambition and greed, solitary scholarship seemed like the obvious religious alternative – an alternative, as it turns out, that could not so easily be separated from the need for community.

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So fifteen years later, in 1532, when More was forced to give up the position he had once congratulated Warham for leaving, he echoed a long-standing conviction with his insistence that he was thankful finally to be able to “devote some time to God alone and myself.”122 Though it is easy to hear this as a predictable claim from a man who was recently forced to cede his public office, the claim of self-possession is worthy of note given the standard interpretation, succinctly formulated by Stephen Greenblatt, that More was a man whose “engagement in the world involved precisely the maintaining of a calculated distance between his public persona and his private self.”123 For More, the private self was inseparable from the scholarly self. As he lamented in a prefatory letter to Utopia, “I leave to myself, that is to learning, no time at all” (relinquo mihi, hoc est literis, nihil ).124 To be with himself and to learn was the same thing. For this authentic self, devotion to God and learning were ideally synonymous, as he explains in another letter from 1532, where he credits Henry for granting him the leisure to devote himself “to studies and to God.”125 But if More the vulnerable subject insists that what he receives from his earthly sovereign ineluctably enhances what he can give to his heavenly Lord, he avers simultaneously that it is only insofar as he is free from service to the king that his authentic self can manifest studious devotion for God.126 Throughout his adult life, More reinforced this equation between privacy, scholarship, and devotion by insisting emphatically, publicly, and somewhat controversially, on celebrating his daughters’ learning. The resources devoted to educating the girls in his family gave a kind of visceral force to the pious cliché that knowledge diluted worldly ambition, because knowledge did not, could not, bring women public offices or glory. Instead, if it was worthwhile for women to learn, this was necessarily because knowledge inculcated a virtue that disavowed the importance of worldly rewards – the kind of spoils for which they, as women, were ineligible. Thus in a letter to his children’s tutor that he later published along with his Latin epigrams, More wrote that he wanted his children to . . . esteem in their studies most whatever may teach them piety towards God, charity to all, and modesty and Christian humility in themselves. By such means they will receive from God the reward of an innocent life, and in the assured expectation of it will view death without dread, and meanwhile possessing solid joy will neither be puffed up by the empty praise of men, nor dejected by evil tongues. These I consider the real and genuine fruits of learning, and though I admit that all literary men do not possess them, I would maintain that those who give themselves to study with such intent will easily attain their end and become perfect.127

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A life of study could be a religious life for men and women alike, so long as they embraced it as an alternative to worldly values and calculations.

erasmus, speaking from the position of a full-time scholar, was even more explicit that the work of scholarship was salvific. A life entirely devoted to God, according to Erasmus, entails being absorbed by Scripture and “either reading or writing something continually.”128 The work scholars did was religious work, capable of renewing Christianity; and study – the study of Greek, for instance – could be, as Erasmus put it, essential for his salus. In classical Latin, salus means “survival” or “well-being,” but in Christian Latin it means “salvation.” Consequently, although the translator of this sentence in the Complete Works renders this as Erasmus’s claim that his studies are essential “to my reputation, indeed my survival,” Erasmus believed his studies enabled the metaphysical state that English speakers signify with the word “salvation” – a notion that (as this translation issue suggests) seems foreign to our modern assumption that unless one is studying the Bible, the goals of scholarship are not religious.129 Scholarship, according to Erasmus, was sacred because it was oriented to eternity: Those who work in the world are “active at best in worldly things and constrained within narrow limits. But he who restores a literature in ruins is engaged in a thing sacred and immortal.”130 Like classical and Christian ascetics before him, Erasmus envisioned his work as a kind of discipline or training that could make him into a person impervious to the transitory allure of the world, an avid seeker of truth.131 In Erasmus’s Christian version of this askesis, practitioners attained successive levels of purity that brought them closer to Christ.132 From his perspective, education was a conduit for the Word of God133 and philosophy was not just a way of life but a route to eternal bliss. Thus in various works he emphasizes that celestial philosophy requires a purified soul, worries that Christian philosophy will be “sullied” by contact with human decrees, and emphasizes that the scholar should seek leisure and quiet in order to prepare himself to receive the Bridegroom.134 Erasmus reinforced this connection between scholarship and salvation by equating the work of scholars with the actions of saints. In Antibarbari (1489–95), the early work defending pagan learning that he wrote soon after leaving the monastery, Erasmus suggested that the “blood of the martyrs” and the “pens of the learned writers” similarly nourished Christianity. And he aligned himself with the early Christian saint and biblical translator Jerome by producing his own critical edition of the Bible, by editing Jerome’s work, and by writing a Life of Jerome – all the while presenting his favorite

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church father as the exemplary scholar-saint.135 Consequently, as Lisa Jardine explains, Instead of the figure of the self-mortifying penitent, it is Jerome’s library, and Jerome’s study, which, in Erasmus’s version, most fully embody the scholarsaint. . . . It follows that the posture in which the individual Christian most fully partakes of Jerome’s example is in the study, in the act of full attentiveness to sacred texts and their exegesis, and that that activity has absorbed from Jerome his ‘aura of sanctity.’136

The transfusion of this aura supplemented Erasmus’s command to the scholar to inhabit eternity by studying: “Live as if you were going to die tomorrow,” Erasmus wrote in Antibarbari, and “study as if you were to live forever.”137

how does scholarship sanctify? This sort of eloquent claim about the link between scholarship and immortality was not in itself an answer to the question of how knowledge sanctifies, although Erasmus and More, like most humanists, frequently insisted that the answer to this question was self-evident. In More’s scholarly goals for his children, he conceded that although not all learned men are pious, those who “give themselves to study with this intent will easily attain their end and become perfect.” To support this optimism, he asserts that learning will “accompany virtue as a shadow does a body.”138 Though a shadow seems like a simple image, More’s claim is complicated. A shadow is a passive presence that neither changes nor shapes the figure that forms it. But in exhorting his children’s tutor to teach them well, More was not simply observing that learning accompanies a preexisting virtue. The Latin here translated as “accompany” is derived from the noun comes, meaning comrade. The verb can also mean “attends to,” in the sense we might associate with the active work comrades might do for each other. The difficulty in translation comes from the fact that “attend” cannot simply be inserted into the phrase, because shadows do not attend to bodies. The dual nuance of the Latin verb, with its simultaneous connotations of activity and passivity, thus sustains the ambiguity of More’s comparison and highlights the complexity of the seemingly simple assertion that learning transforms people. The uncertainty about how people are changed by what they study was compounded by the sense that this was a religious issue – a question, in other words, of delineating between profane and sacred, heretical and salvific, and of how to move from the mundane to the sublime.

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For people like More and Erasmus – for scholars, that is, trained in rhetoric and steeped in knowledge of classical rhetoricians – claims about learning were rooted in assumptions about the power of words. “Our daily conversations,” Erasmus writes, “reveal what we are.” Humans are distinctive because they have the capacity for speech, oratio. This capacity is more important than reason, because it is words that make ideas efficacious. Erasmus, as anyone who has ever tried to read through the erasmian corpus will not be surprised to learn, found writing internally compelling – the more he wrote, the more he wanted to write. He “practiced” daily by writing letters he describes as a free-form exercise, “throwing off any kind of nonsense to one or two dear friends and rattling on the way one man talks to another in the intimacy of a glass of wine between friends and cronies.”139 Erasmus wrote over sixteen hundred letters that we know of, although his exemplary style belies his claim of carelessness and reflects instead the classical rhetorician’s selfconsciousness, which led him to edit and publish many of his own letters. Erasmus wrote formal treatises about letter-writing, and added the “familiar” letter to the traditional tripartite division of letters into deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial,140 but alongside rhetorical skill he emphasized direct selfexpression, and insisted that written works should clearly reflect the “mind and life” of the author. As Jerome said in a letter Erasmus edited, “What better way to make those who are absent present, than to use letters to speak and listen to those who delight you?”141 Consequently, Erasmus not only liked letters written in a direct and familiar style, but also insisted that it is better to have a letter written by the correspondent himself rather than by a secretary.142 In keeping with this emphasis on self-expression, Erasmus offered something akin to an early modern form of gestalt therapy by counseling a melancholy friend to compose letters that were more than a montage of pieces from other authors, but were instead expressions of his spontaneous thoughts.143 More, the polemical opponent of heresy, dealt more directly with the dark side of this reliance on words. More believed that all theological errors were rooted in errors of language, and he warned people not to translate Scripture lest they choose the wrong word. He himself, however, was ineluctably trapped in the maelstrom when he used language and exegetical arguments to refute Luther’s use of the same. As Brian Cummings argues, because More wrote in English as well as Latin, he could not simply invoke an established standard for evaluating theological arguments; with well over one million words of polemic (including the lengthy Responsio ad Lutherum [1523] and Dialogue Concerning Heresies [1529]), More testifies all too clearly that “only death . . . could interrupt the endless glossing.”144 More did not subsequently disavow language, but by contrast with Erasmus, his work after 1520 is not

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permeated with confident claims about the transformative power of words; in the works he wrote or finished in the Tower – A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, On the Sadness of Christ, and A Treatise on the Passion – he created instead both poignant and amusing meditations that dealt indirectly with the more modest claim that words can be comforting. By contrast, Erasmus’s encounter with Luther did not diminish his confidence in the religious efficacy of words. His theology subsequently changed in subtle ways – for example he focused more on the mystery of Christ than he had previously – but the key issue emerged from his early attempts to study original sources and remained with him throughout his life. For Erasmus, the issue was how to deal with the fact that words could pollute as well as purify.145 Written words in particular raised the problem of purity and danger because they were more powerful than spoken words. Writing lasts longer, travels farther, reaches more people, and, Erasmus claimed, can convey a person’s presence more effectively than physical proximity or conversation:146 “For such is my opinion: if a man had lived in familiar converse with Cicero (to take him as an example) for several years, he will know less of Cicero than they do who by constant reading of what he wrote converse with his spirit every day.”147 Erasmus believed that recognition of this hermeneutic principle that writing conveys people allowed the wise men of antiquity to give up venerating dead bodies in order to devote themselves to the books the dead left behind: They perceived of course, . . . that it was barbarous for the corpses of the dead to be so carefully embalmed . . . when their preservation served no purpose since they could no longer reproduce the features or figure of the deceased, which even a statue of stone can do, and to take no such care to preserve the relics of the mind. And so they thought it far more appropriate to transfer that solicitude to the books of great men, in which they live on for the world at large even after death, and live on in such a fashion that they speak to more people and more effectively dead than alive.148

A life transmitted through the written word participates with God’s word in the activity of bestowing immortality. Readers, he says, take possession of a text by correcting it, reading it, meditating on it. On this Erasmus cites Jerome’s authority that “anything that we have made our own by correcting, reading, constant devotion, we can fairly claim is ours. . . . It is a river of gold, a well stocked library, that a man acquires who possesses Jerome and nothing else. He does not possess him, on the other hand, if his text is like what used to be in circulation, all confusion and impurity.”149 The efficacy of a work, that is, does not derive solely from the

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author’s hand, and it accrues to the reader not through a detached process of knowing a text or even through an objective claim to the accuracy of the text, but rather through the labor of editing and reading – labor that creates a relationship not only with the text but also with the author.150 Communicating with Christ entails similar dynamics. Erasmus identifies true philosophy as the philosophy of Christ because Christ was the exemplary rhetorician, the man who sought to reform rather than inform his followers: “In this kind of philosophy, located as it is more truly in the disposition of the mind than in syllogisms, life means more than debate, inspiration is preferable to erudition, transformation is a more important matter than intellectual comprehension.”151 Scriptural writings make this possible because they “bring you the living image of Christ’s holy mind and the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ Himself, and thus they render Him so fully present that you would see less if you gazed upon Him with your very eyes.” In the gospels and apostolic letters, Christ is known “almost more effectively than when he dwelt among men.” Erasmus thereby calls on Christians to recognize that the immediacy of the text is akin to physical possession – people should treat these writings as they do letters from good friends, holding, kissing, reading and rereading them.152 Yet this intimacy with Christ as with other authors raises the issue of how to distinguish a pure or salvific work from one that is polluted. In the preface to the Enchiridion, his guide for lay Christians, Erasmus explains that in Scripture, Christ left us some “live coals” and “living unfailing rivulets from the spring of his mind.” But the spring is not easily accessible. It has been stopped up and polluted by ecclesial corruption and popular superstition.153 Purity is not simply intrinsic to Scripture, then, but is instead a state recovered by the reader, and through the work of learned readers in particular. Erasmus’s most straightforward answer to the question of how to purify the text is the humanist shibboleth ad fontes – back to the sources! Scholars, it was insisted, should read original sources in their original language. But as Cummings has shown, this was an answer beset by problems. For instance in the Paraclesis, his introduction to his critical edition of the New Testament, Erasmus had to proclaim the superiority of the Greek original in Latin: “To show forth the truth of the true original, Erasmus not only has to translate it into another language but has to explicate every difference between the original and the copy. . . . Not the least of the ironies of Erasmus’s textual introduction is that having rejected all need for commentary his own text is copiously annotated.”154 Erasmus was equally invested in the similarly difficult conundrum of how to overcome the fact that words can infect and corrupt people. If words deceive,

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how then does reading purify? Erasmus indicts monks and scholastic theologians alike as people who misuse words.155 Words are the source of the “irksome confusion” that obscures Christ’s true teaching. The “clash of words” corrupted Christianity insofar as it led Christians to rely on philosophical arguments to resolve disagreements.156 We should be able to “exercise on the playing-fields of learning without incurring injury,” he writes plaintively to Dorp – but we cannot. Therein lies one of the key problems with the place of knowledge in society.157 Erasmus the compulsive correspondent, profligate author, and (self-proclaimed) heroic editor could agree with the polemical claim made by his friend, the biblical scholar John Colet (1467–1519), that a holy and pure life is found not through the complicated pursuit of knowledge, but down the road one traverses only by “fervent love and imitation of Christ.”158 For Erasmus, however, love arises out of a relationship with the written word, and the desire to love and imitate Christ leads him ineluctably back to the question of how scholarly praxis engenders sanctification. In the Enchiridion he explicitly stated that prayer depends on knowledge and implicitly affirmed that a course of study is a way of life.159 The uniquely formative powers of scholarship enable one to shed worldly pollution in order to know the things of God. Following Augustine, Erasmus insists that classical studies prepare one to study Scripture,160 and glosses this with his characteristic interest in purity: “One should not touch the Holy Scripture except with washed hands – this is to say, with absolute purity of mind – lest sin’s antidote be turned into poison for you, and the manna turned rancid.”161 But this idea that pagan scholarship can purify and form those who use it correctly raises some difficult questions about the relationship between the author and his work. As Erasmus assures his readers, “I would by no means have you adopt the moral habits of the pagans as a result of studying their literature.” Intent, it seems, and the willingness to go beyond the letter to the spirit of the work, can inoculate one against this potential infection. “To the pure all things are pure, whereas to the dirty, on the other hand, nothing is clean.” Erasmus vividly emphasizes the force of this point by using the dramatic contrast between Solomon’s spiritual purity and his sexual peccadilloes: “It will be nothing against you if, like Solomon, you keep at home sixty queens, eighty concubines, and innumerable virgins of the secular sciences provided only that divine wisdom is above all the rest your dove, your thing of beauty, your best beloved.”162 This idea that purity is a product of detachment, though, seems simultaneously to undermine Erasmus’s description of how it is that certain authors – and certain forms of knowledge – shape, form, and purify you. The character of the authors and the nature of their works lead one’s mind to better things:

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“If you are looking for food for the soul rather than a show of ingenuity, then meditate most profoundly upon the ancient commentators, whose goodness is more reliably tested, whose learning is more copious and mellow, whose language is neither dry nor crude, and whose interpretations are more in keeping with the spiritual content.”163 As Brian Cummings evocatively observes, Erasmus taught Europe how to read differently, and the significance of this hyperbolic claim is affirmed by James Tracy’s point that Erasmus anticipates Gadamer, the twentieth-century hermeneutic philosopher, by insisting that reading is a praxis that requires good will and civility.164 But equally important is the fact that for Erasmus these virtues, valorized by modern thinkers like Gadamer, were not as important as purity – thus his sense of what is required for reading is closely linked to traditional Christianity’s notion of material purity and pollution. In contrast, say, to biblical literalists who think of the “pure source” as a static entity, fixed and validated by the accuracy of the words on the page, Erasmus thereby envisions reading Scripture as a process of purification, achieved through the reader’s relationship to the text because – and only because – the text enables the reader to establish a relationship with the author.165 Reading, in other words, is a sociable, spiritual, act. Consequently, in his concluding advice about which ancient authors to read, Erasmus invokes the ideal scholar – the man who is good, learned, eloquent, and focused on piety – as the guide to purity,166 and aligns himself with this ideal as he underscores the importance of relationships. Gaps between the efficacy of the text and the goodness of the author, between the usefulness of knowledge and the simplicity of piety, between the capacity of words to purify or to pollute, could (he maintains) be erased by the interactive work done with and for learned friends. Erasmus’s directions to a young scholar echo this conviction. If you want to learn, he advised, you must first find a teacher who is also a friend. Time should be set apart not only for silent contemplation but also for conversation, and before going to sleep you should fill and guide your thoughts by reading a good book. Reading, conversation, friendship, and learning weave together to create purity and sanctity. This process of salvific transformation requires presence – a requirement that goes some way toward explaining the eloquent laments about absence that fill More and Erasmus’s letters. As More wrote in 1504 to Colet, his early mentor, absence deprived him not only of “pleasant companionship” and “delightful intimacy” but also of necessary guidance. “For in the city,” More asks sadly, “what is there to move one to live well?” Thus Colet’s absence makes it harder for More to be guided by his “example and life.” Here More

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insists so strongly on the importance of presence that instead of maintaining that Colet can guide him from afar, he concedes that he can find something of what he needs by “passing time” with friends who are still with him in London.167 In later letters, More will echo Erasmus’s claim that we can know people better through writings than through personal contact, but not with the same unequivocal force that Erasmus developed in order to explain how dead authors could be living friends. For example, speaking of mutual friends in a 1516 letter to Erasmus, More acknowledges that “I feel I love them more and know them much better from what you have told me of them and from their writings than many of the people I meet every day.” But More remains more focused on presence than on the fact that writing conveys it, as he suggests when he attributes his knowledge as much to Erasmus’s report as to the mutual friends’ writings, and with his conditional claim that writing conveys better knowledge than “many” (but presumably not all) personal contacts.168 More’s elegant letters consequently parse the relationship not only between letters and presence, but also between physical contact and satisfying interactions. As he wrote to William Budaeus in 1520, “I thought I would be completely happy if I had the good fortune ever to see Budaeus face to face (of whom reading had drawn me a very beautiful image).” Reading conjured up an image that made him long to be with the person, but what reading provided was still only an image, not real presence. In fact More was not entirely content when they finally had a chance to meet because, as he later lamented, they did not have an opportunity to talk. Letters, he subsequently conceded, were valuable not only because they conjure up images, but because they approximate conversations.169 More found letters necessary but insufficient because what was essential was personal presence. It is this standard, rather than his confidence in written words, that explains why as a translator he omitted Pico’s claim that true friendship can be sustained even without letters. It was not that letters or written communication were irrelevant between true friends, but that presence was crucial.170 Similarly, we should read More’s letters thanking Erasmus and Gilles for the portraits of themselves they gave him as written testimonies to the fact that writing should be, above all, about presence.171 It is not the picture alone, and not just the letters about it, but rather the conjunction of both as testimony to a friendship that More celebrates: “You would hardly believe, my most lovable Erasmus, how my affection for you, which I was convinced would admit of no addition, has been increased by this desire of yours to bind me still closer to you.”172

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More cherishes the affection and presence of true friendship, not the paintings or letters themselves, because these media raise the spectre of forgery – of one person speaking for another. More raises this issue with light irony in his letter to Gilles: My dear Peter, marvelously as our Quentin has represented everything, what a wonderful forger above all else it looks as though he might have been! He has imitated the address on my letter to you so well that I do not believe I could repeat it myself. And so, unless he wants it for some purpose of his own, or you are keeping it for your own ends, do please let me have the letter back: it will double the effect if it is kept handy alongside the picture. If it has been lost, or you have a use for it, I will see whether I in my turn can imitate the man who imitates my hand so well.173

Notwithstanding More’s casual tone, the fact that he raised the question of forgery is telling. Insincerity or false imitation is what he seeks to avoid through friendship – and especially through the presence of his friends. Erasmus, too, worried about authenticity insofar as it related to salvific purity and presence. As the editor of Jerome’s works, he insists confidently that “imitation certainly never reaches a jewel’s genuine sparkle,” and this conviction fuels not only his desire to reject, for example, works falsely attributed to Jerome but also his insistence that hagiographic lives, such as his Life of Jerome, ought to be accurate rather than “fictional.” This should not be misread, though, as a quest for historical accuracy. When Erasmus writes in the Life of Jerome that “truth has its own power,” he is writing not about verifiable facts but about a transformative force. Moreover, a possible transcription mistake underscores the dynamism of the truth Erasmus seeks: The Greek word here translated as power is energeia, but Terence Cave argues that Erasmus may have intended to use another Greek rhetorical term meaning “vividness” or “brilliance.” This possible alternative emphasizes that when Erasmus thought of truth he had in mind direct contact, vivid presence – a promise held out by texts if one encountered them in the context of the right kinds of relationships.174 In More’s terms, this meant that he could find an authentic self with his friends. Although he concedes that letters can bridge distances – as in his description of how “letters (making naught of envious space) / Bring near the loved one’s mind, and I his face” – More repeatedly emphasizes the importance of actually being with his friends, rather than just reading or thinking about them. This is his message to Erasmus in a letter about their mutual friend Richard Pace: “He can converse with me by letter, but face to face neither with

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me nor with you; I only hope his business will go well and he will soon return home, so that I may enjoy the society of one-half of myself, at any rate.”175 More thereby emphasizes that relationships affirm a kind of selfhood. Erasmus, by contrast, focuses on how relationships engender purity. But for both men, interactions with the right kind of people – whether dead authors or living friends – hold out the promise of salvific transformation.

erasmus’s prolific work as an author and his long-standing efforts as a community-builder make it easy to interpret him as a confident Christian scholar rather than an ambivalent spiritual seeker. With More, by contrast, the tensions are easy to see because of the drama surrounding his execution. Caught up in religious controversy, More increasingly prioritized the authority of the church over the authority of scholars, and put less faith in the power of books to change people. During his final months in prison, More achieved something close to real solitude. His only company came from an illiterate servant, John a Wood, and occasional visits from his family.176 Besides writing letters, he spent most of his time praying and penning devotional works. Yet desire for community still permeated his writings. Even as he meditated on Psalm 69, “I become a stranger unto my brethren,”177 More used the account of how Christ spent the night before he was captured to talk about an ideal community. Noting, for example, that Christ spoke about holiness during his last supper with the apostles, More marked the quality of conversation as the most notable failure to live up to Christ’s ideal: “Alas, how different we are from Christ, though we call ourselves Christians: our conversation during meals is not only meaningless and inconsequential . . . but our table-talk is also vicious.”178 More’s theological discussion about why humans fail to offer steadfast devotion to God culminates in the pathos of the apostles’ failure to stay awake with Christ throughout the night. Far removed from polite chatter and social calculations, More nevertheless continued to seek out a separate realm and to imagine it as a realm defined by the quality of its relationships. Thus as he faced a stark choice of life or death, More remained focused on issues similar to those that preoccupied Erasmus. Disenchanted with monasticism and unconvinced about the value of traditional saintly asceticism, Erasmus identified purity and transcendence with an exemplary community of pious scholars. For More, this community ultimately failed. Instead of embodying pristine spiritual values, it manifested the same betrayals and uncertainty rampant in other realms of society. Erasmus, by contrast, never

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encountered a similarly severe experience that threatened to erase the boundary between the profane world and the sacralized community he sought to construct. In this sense, the differences between More and Erasmus are significant. But they shared – with each other and with other Catholic intellectuals – a desire to delineate the boundary between sacred and profane for themselves, and to step across it into a separate, communal sphere of spiritual seekers.

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2

Creating an Alternative Community: Spiritual Values and the Search for Meaning

I

n 1536, reginald pole (1500–1558) denounced his generous patron Henry VIII. Pole, the younger son of the king’s cousin, had received stipends from Henry since 1512 and a regular annual income of £100 since 1521. His letter of 1536 condemning Henry’s divorce had one immediate effect: The king stopped sending him money.1 Pole was probably not surprised. Patronage always entails reciprocity, and if cutting off funds seems to be a particularly crass acknowledgment that patrons expect quid pro quo, it also seems to go right to the heart of the matter. Pole wrote the letter (later published and known conventionally as De unitate or the Defense of the Unity of the Church) because the king had asked for it, and the respectful request – conveyed by an intermediary – explicitly reminded Pole that he owed the king something because all of his knowledge and learning had been obtained “by the goodness of God and his grace’s liberality.”2 Pole readily acknowledged this debt. He began the letter by calling Henry the “patron (fautor) of my studies,” and he described himself as a faithful subject and a suitably grateful client. “In pursuit of my own literary studies, I have been in search of precious wares . . . and have spent a large portion of my life in foreign lands. Whatever benefits (fructus), then, I may have derived from my studies in literature is in all justice entirely at your disposal, for I gained them solely through your generosity.”3 This exchange exposes the skeletal form of patronage, bared of the pious disclaimers or eloquent declarations of beneficence and affection that flesh out the relationship.4 Patrons, motivated by self-interest, give out money or favors to clients who offer something in return. Yet just as there is no such thing as a living skeleton, so too patronage does not exist without the affective language and justifications that animate its logic of reciprocity and give it historical specificity. For those who study the Renaissance, as John Hale once remarked, the notion that patronage was a dominant social process is axiomatic but vague. This vagueness is a problem, because the Renaissance was a period 55

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when structural changes intensified the clash between the utilitarian logic and the intimate rhetoric of patronage. These changes engendered intense ambivalence and altered participants’ perceptions of which relationships were meaningful and why.5 When Pole repudiated Henry, he did so by invoking his need to honor another relationship. Instead of disavowing his debt, in other words, he insisted that he was properly fulfilling it. Citing the martyrs – Thomas More and others – who had been executed after refusing to sign Henry’s Act of Supremacy, Pole claimed that they were the true source of what he owed to Henry: “How could I show greater ingratitude than by implying before God and my conscience that I could only derive as much profit (fructum) from the deaths of these men, as I derived from my studies in the readings of the greatest authors?”6 Henry was entitled to “whatever benefits” Pole had derived from his years of study, and yet (as Pole hereby underscores) this is the tricky thing about intellectual or artistic patronage: What the client gains from the patron’s support is not a commodity that can be claimed, traded, bought, or sold. It is instead an abstraction – artistry, knowledge, judgment – inseparable from the person paid to acquire it. Henry, who gave Pole money to get knowledge, had to rely on Pole to judge and articulate this knowledge. Thus Pole’s passionate question (“How could I show greater ingratitude?”) expresses his conviction that he must give Henry the best of what he has gained, and this “profit,” as he puts it here, came from the martyrs. The result, then, is that in order to honor his patron and, more specifically, to honor the demand for meaning that he insisted patronage entailed, Pole must prioritize a different relationship. This conflict between the ideals and reality of patronage motivated what many scholars have described as Pole’s “withdrawal,” or failure to be an effective ecclesial or political leader.7 Pole cordoned off spiritualized scholarship and prioritized his friends over his institutional duties because of the ambivalence (dramatically encapsulated in his break with Henry) produced by structural and ideological changes in intellectual identity and patronage.

already in 1520, before he had acquired much knowledge, the twenty-year-old Pole registered that the “profit” he sought to gain through his patron’s generosity would be both calculable and uncontainable. Asking Henry’s chancellor, Wolsey, to persuade the king to send him abroad, he said not only that his debt would be limitless (“I shall be always in all things in your power”8 ) but also that Wolsey was “like a mother,” one who provides immortalia beneficia. In this way Pole insisted that what the Chancellor would give him is of an entirely different order than a trip to Italy or an annual

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income. Patrons and clients often liken themselves to family and friends, and this is what differentiates them from people bound by legal contracts or formal oaths. Like kinship and friendship, patronage is understood in terms of personalized, intimate claims of loyalty and obligation. Patronage differs from these other kinds of relationship, though, because it has greater potential for paradox. If all relationships involve inequalities and calculations of utility, patronage stands out because relationships between patrons and clients are inherently hierarchical; they would not exist were it not for disparities of resources and power. It is this feature of patronage that leads Ronald Weissman to conclude that in the Italian Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, patronage had an ambivalent moral status.9 When patronage is clearly institutionalized, simply part of a specialized realm (as is the case, for example, in modern academia), or part of a relatively simple kinship-based society, patronage can simultaneously be convincingly personal and effectively utilitarian. But when patronage is a crucial addendum to an institutionalized system in a partially differentiated society, the blend of hierarchy and mutuality threatens to curdle:10 This is what happened not only in ancient Rome but also in England, as the scholarly debate about how to characterize the Tudor government reveals. The Tudors came to power in the fifteenth century, as England was in the process of transforming from a “lineage” to a “civil” society,11 and under their reign government power passed from household to bureaucracy. This is the classic way to describe what G. R. Elton calls the Tudor Revolution. David Starkey, a careful student of the English court, challenges Elton’s description in an important way, however, by insisting that what emerged under Henry VII and VIII was not a bureaucracy but a “politics of intimacy.” All access was controlled through the king’s household, specifically the privy chamber; the king alone could “fulfill or frustrate ambition.”12 The ambiguity suggested by these two different assessments is reflected in Pole’s relationship with Henry. When Henry asked for Pole’s opinion on his divorce, he did so through an agent, and thereby the intimacy between patron and client was mediated – in this case by Thomas Starkey, a sixteenth-century lawyer and statesman. Born between 1495 and 1500 into a gentry family from Cheshire, England, Starkey attended Oxford and then the studium (as the collection of universities and faculties was called) in Padua, where he was part of Pole’s household off and on for nearly thirteen years. By the early 1530s he had acquired both institutional and noninstitutional qualifications that made him a good candidate for royal service. Like many other male gentry who aspired to royal service, Starkey took his degree in law from Padua and – like numerous humanistically trained scholars who proved their worth

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to the realm through their facility with language and arguments from classical texts – he wrote and offered to Henry the political treatise Dialogue between Pole and Lupset. That work presented Pole as a reclusive scholar who, over the course of the dialogue, became a champion of the idea that nobles ought to be trained in a civic education so they might become more effective leaders in an oligarchic system.13 Thus when Starkey wrote to Pole to request an opinion on the king’s divorce, he did so as a former client who had drawn on their relationship to create a political treatise that, along with his law degree, gave him the credentials he needed for royal service.14 Starkey was first charged with soliciting Pole not by the king himself but by the king’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell (the man who had hired Starkey, and the same man who presided over More’s downfall). This retinue of men, like Wolsey before them, loom large in Pole’s story, and the king himself is only faintly visible through the layers of the court. Still, all involved continued to use the language of intimacy. After reminding Pole how they once had been close in “heart and mind,” Starkey reports that he had a conversation with Henry who “most lovingly [had] many things to demand.” Moving easily from affection to business, Starkey explains that he had assured the king that Pole would use all his learning and wisdom “to the maintaining of such things as his grace’s wisdom by court of parliament therein had decreed.” He offers Pole several suggestions about how he ought to think about Henry’s claim that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was invalid because the pope had wrongly granted him dispensation to marry his brother’s widow (“Ponder you well this levitical law,” he says, and the “long usurped and abused authority of the pope”), and concludes with a civics lesson about the importance of national sovereignty: Explaining that Henry had only rejected papal authority and not the “laws and ceremonies” of the church, he concludes that these laws still stand in “full strength and authority; and so they shall boldly I dare affirm, until such time that to his highness and to his most wise council (conseyl) it shall appear expedient them to abrogate and others to substitute by common assent more agreeable to this time and to the nature of our men, and also to our whole country more convenient. Here is no thing done without due order and reasonable mean.”15 In measured tones, Starkey presents royal authority as both absolute (justified by its own existence, as ordained by God) and rational (authorized by its reasonable and beneficent style of governance). Though he gives no hint that these are contradictory warrants, the tendency for the former to trump the latter was soon evident in his own life, when the aftermath of Pole’s condemnation of Henry led to Starkey’s dismissal as well (and similar twists and turns meant that Starkey was soon restored to royal favor).16

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That was still a couple of years in the future, though, and in the letter to Pole, Starkey does what he can to affirm the sincerity of the king’s request. He avers that Henry does not want simpering approval, reporting that the king explicitly asked him to tell Pole to speak without “color or cloak of dissimulation.” Starkey repeats this phrase several times in their subsequent correspondence about Pole’s response to the divorce, and with good reason: Given the paradoxical mix of assertions of royal whim and governmental due process he has described, all concerned realize that deception is a good and even necessary option. The uncertainty this creates is compounded by the affective language he weaves throughout. Withdrawing both metaphorically and literally from the king’s presence, Starkey returns to Cromwell and assures Pole that the chief minister acts out of love for Pole. Starkey further insists that if Pole ever has a chance to meet Cromwell “[you shall] have him in stable and reverent love . . . as I do for his virtues and not only for his authority.”17 Starkey thereby speaks simultaneously as a licensed lawyer, a political theorist, and an anxious courtier. Those he serves, like Cromwell, have an authority that is both institutional, in the sense that it is not dependent on his personal virtues, and personal, affirmed by love. If Henry’s court is not then properly described as a bureaucracy, it is also something other than an extended household. In the midst of this hybrid Pole is not a royal servant, but neither is he straightforwardly a personal client. The subsequent problems fit a sociological pattern. As the sociologists Eisenstadt and Roniger explain in their cross-cultural study of patronage and friendship, in these sorts of context it is not clear which criteria regulate a given sphere. This has important consequences because it makes it difficult to maintain trust. Pole’s life offers vivid and even brutal illustrations of this abstract sociological observation. As early as 1521, when Henry sent Pole off to study in Italy with his money and his approval, the king maintained a watchful, even suspicious stance, dispatching a letter to the Signoria in Venice telling them to watch out lest Pole become too ambitious, like the Duke of Buckingham (whom Henry had recently arrested). And fifteen years later, after Pole had protested the divorce, Pole’s mother and brother were executed, as his uncle had been by Henry’s father.18 These are dramatic examples of a systemic problem that led participants to conclude that their loyalty was too often betrayed and their trust misplaced. Pole’s pent-up frustration is evident in the fact that in the letter about Henry’s divorce, he vents about his uncle’s murder, which happened before he was born: “There was certainly only one thing that impelled your father to the murder of my uncle who was, in the general opinion of all, as innocent in his whole life as an infant of one year, as the Scriptures are wont to say. This one thing was the fact that he was the

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son of the brother of King Edward.” Thus he accuses Henry’s father of killing an innocent solely in order to preserve his own power – and, by implication, that the great sin of ambition similarly drives Henry to betray those he claims to love. Trust was difficult to build in this sort of atmosphere.19

although this society was littered with ranks and titles, birthright was an ambiguous source of status. Pole was a nobleman with quasiroyal status; were he not closely related to the king, Henry would not have begun to subsidize his education when he was twelve years old – long before he could have claimed the king’s attention through his own abilities. There are many examples where Pole emphasized this identity. In the same letter where he acknowledged his debt to Henry, he cited his nobility to affirm a kind of equality (reminding Henry “out of all the nobility in England, you chose myself alone”), and as Thomas Mayer shows clearly, in much of the Defense of the Unity of the Church Pole speaks as one noble to another, indicting Henry for transgressions against the nobility’s standards of honor, succession, and chivalry.20 As Pole explains to Wolsey when pleading for a chance to study in Italy, “nobility ought to be instructed and adorned by such studies.”21 It is not incidental that these last words were addressed to the son of a butcher from Ipswich. Wolsey (1475–1530) went to Oxford, became a priest and then a chaplain to Henry VII before jumping more directly into politics and landing the position of Lord Chancellor in 1515. Just as Starkey, from the gentry, positioned himself as one of the king’s agents who could call Pole the nobleman to heel, so too Wolsey’s power over Pole reminds us that the connection between nobility and power was not secure, and that this deeply hierarchical society was also one in which status could be acquired with the right kind of performance.22 This was true throughout much of Europe, and England and Italy certainly, as Norbert Elias and subsequent scholars have argued.23 Power was redistributed and consolidated by mercantile oligarchies and self-made principalities, creating societies where blood and lineage were still powerful, but no longer sufficient, sources of status.24 In a world of courts and courtiers, inherited aristocracy and performative nobility – a world of ambiguous but enormously consequential power plays – knights were replaced by courtiers, swords and flattering speech became more important than feudal oaths, and skillful self-representation separated the winners from the losers.25 Whether they were part of the gentry class who helped the Tudors dominate other noble families, or Venetian patricians who were newly required to prove their nobility to the state, or Tuscans seeking the governmentally conferred dignitas that

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succeeded lineage as a determinant of social status, those who would have political or social power within these societies consequently worked in the shadow of what Harry Berger neatly describes as “representation anxiety.”26 Pole’s noble birth thus did not exempt him from this anxiety, but even as he performed his status in order to affirm it, he was not unambiguously committed to acquiring power. This is not meant as a statement on Pole’s character (that elusive entity that biographers try to capture), but instead as a claim about his social identity, the identity he shared with other members of the Religious Republic of Letters. Pole was an intellectual, and as such his claim to status was partly based on the notion that he was a disinterested seeker of knowledge rather than power. In other words, intellectuals were socially valued because they were useful in a distinctive way – not just as possessors of specific skills, but also (more amorphously) as personifiers of abstract ideals: Knowledge was more valuable than social utility; meaning was more important than social advantage; and intellectual pursuits exercised the highest human faculties and brought people closer to God. The social assumption that intellectuals were unique in turn affected the way intellectuals perceived themselves. In some sense it necessitated their commitment to the ideals they invoked to justify their claims to status – or at least meant that there were compelling reasons for them to claim these ideals for themselves.27 Pole’s move to take hold of this identity, and the ideals it entailed, was evident already on his arrival in Italy when he was around twenty years old. Reporting to Henry about the lavish greeting he received from Venetian dignitaries – the welcome they deemed worthy of the English king’s noble cousin – Pole reported that he had assured his new hosts that he appreciated their attention “not for the honor but because it gave me a chance to meet so many learned men.”28 This sort of comment does many things at once. It shows a diplomatic humility, both to the Venetian hosts and to the king; it reassures Henry that Pole knows how to accrue the intellectual status that makes him valuable in Henry’s eyes; and it points toward a community – separate from aristocracy and country – that will eventually give Pole the standing to oppose Henry. The prestige the intellectual community had independent of the patrons who supported it is attested to by Henry’s own desire to be esteemed as a man of letters. As a newly crowned king, Henry once confided to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, that he “longed to be a more accomplished scholar.” Mountjoy, who had been Erasmus’s student and Prince Henry’s study partner, was the recipient of this confidence because he seemed to have the intellectual skills the new king wanted. And Mountjoy traded on this identity. In a letter

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to Erasmus, Mountjoy used the first-person plural to identify himself with scholars when he reported that he had assured Henry that “we do not expect” you to become a great scholar yourself; “what we do expect (expetimus) is that you should foster and encourage those who are scholars.” Mountjoy happily reported that Henry agreed that the relationship between patrons and scholars was both necessary and natural, “for without [scholars] we could (essemus) scarcely exist.”29 The arrangement that Mountjoy affirms in this exchange reifies the distinct identity of a nebulous group – the literati, in other words, so broadly defined that Mountjoy (a gentlemen scholar who spent most of his adult life heading up armies or serving at court as Catherine of Aragon’s chamberlain)30 could include himself with confidence (“we do not expect [expetimus]”), and yet so clearly defined that Henry presumes there was a gap between their collective identity and his own royal we (“without scholars, we could scarcely exist [essemus]”). Thus this exchange delineates a society that affirmed intellectuals’ dependence on a social economy of reciprocity, even as it attributed to them status that was based on their claims to be inhabitants of a separate realm. Pole’s pleasantry to the Venetian officials (“because it gave me a chance to meet so many learned men”) resonates more strongly, too, if we look ahead fifteen years hence, when he justified his repudiation of Henry by appealing to the martyrs who were, Pole proclaims, exemplary learned men. Several monks were executed around the same time and for the same reasons as Thomas More and John Fisher, but it is More and Fisher alone whom Pole repeatedly invokes, and their deaths that he especially deplores. He tells Henry that More and Fisher were his dear friends (“among the best of all my friends”) and good friends also to the king. Pole had never actually met Fisher, but this language of intimacy intertwines with the solidarity of the intellectual community; in this way Pole asserts that it is More and Fisher’s identity as intellectuals that marks their deaths as outrageous. He reminds Henry that the king himself had compared them to the “greatest scholars in the world,” and they surpassed their contemporaries in “every literary skill worthy of a liberally educated Christian man.”31 Pole insists that by killing these esteemed men of letters, Henry – once a worthy patron of intellectuals – betrayed his own ideals: No one can deny that you once possessed a great reputation for talent and virtue. No one can deny that you zealously cherished this among all Christian nations and people wherever there were public discussions of learned lawyers and theologians, wherever there were discussions not accidentally and carelessly assembled by the common people, but in places where there were learned philosophical discussions in the customary manner of those pre-eminent in learning.32

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Although his broader argument was about how Henry had transgressed against God and the church, Pole focuses specifically on the argument that the king should be fiercely indicted for repudiating the learned community that had once claimed him as a worthy member.

when pole, newly arrived in italy, sought out learned men, he was seeking both prestige and knowledge. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, this two-step had become a particularly intricate part of an intellectual’s dance with power. Of course, not everyone danced the same way. Thomas Starkey, who went to Italy around the same time as Pole and lived in the same circles if not the same house, later presented himself as a candidate for the king’s service by describing a straightforward series of moves: “Because my purpose then was to live in a political life, I set myself now these last years past to the knowledge of the civil law.”33 In the early 1530s, Starkey studied law at Paris and then Padua, where the law faculty was well-established and increasingly popular. The number of English students at Padua studying with the faculty of arts or medicine peaked in the 1520s and 30s and then dropped sharply – precisely at the time when the number of students in the law faculty began to increase at a steady rate.34 Like Starkey, most of these students studied law with the understanding that it was a ticket to royal service – a fact that leads Jonathan Woolfson to conclude that it was Italian traditions in legal scholarship, rather than humanism per se, that most strongly influenced the English civic ethic.35 In one sense, then, universities in the sixteenth century performed the same function they had since the twelfth century – by supplying students with skills that made them useful to courts and municipalities.36 If the usefulness of their training gained intellectuals social support in the Middle Ages, it was the institutional context that universities provided – offering students and teachers licenses and degrees as well as legal rights, immunities, and privileges – that turned intellectuals into a new stratum of society, with some social autonomy and legal protections against local governments.37 Although there was always a tension between collegial independence on the one hand, and dependence on those who provided financial support on the other, intellectuals were a powerful contingent in their own right. As Alexander of Roes proclaimed in 1281, alongside the spiritual and temporal powers of Sacerdotium and Imperium there was a third power: Studium.38 Academic degrees became so important, and education such a mark of social distinction, that by the end of the Middle Ages “the doctorate approximated the noble title as a claim of deference.”39 Probably most students had some official

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connection to the church: Many for instance, were supported by prebends (revenues from cathedral or collegiate churches) while they studied. But there were lay students in the system as well, and at least in terms of cultural perception, intellectuals were their own category, not necessarily defined by institutional affiliation with the church. Clericus became a term used for anyone who could write, and laicus came to mean ignorant as well as nonecclesiastical.40 By the fifteenth century, however, many events conspired to make intellectuals more dependent on royal power than they had been previously. Between 1350 and 1450 there were not one but three crises vast and dramatic enough to earn names – the Great Schism, the Hundred Years War, and the Black Death – as well as numerous more diffuse problems: the conflict with the Turks to the East; cessation of economic growth; famine; and the decline of the imperial house and subsequent struggle for supremacy among territorial powers in the Empire, Burgundy, and Italy. One thing that emerged out of the turmoil was more powerful secular rulers. As they consolidated their realms, secular rulers took over spheres previously controlled by the church. Popes and emperors as well as regional powers had long supported universities, but events in the church – particularly the Avignon papacy and the fifteenth-century councils – made ecclesial and secular leaders alike more aware of the social and administrative advantages that rulers could gain from universities.41 Consequently, several new universities were founded in the fifteenth century, and princes controlled them more thoroughly than they had in the past.42 This development is important for the purposes of our story because it exposes one of the pressures at work on intellectual culture in the sixteenth century: The institution that facilitated a kind of independent identity for intellectuals had changed significantly, in ways that subtly diminished intellectuals’ autonomy. Would-be lawyers, administrators, doctors, and theologians were apparently more convinced than ever before that a university education was invaluable. Despite population losses, there was a “crisis of oversupply” in the population of prospective students after the 1480s.43 Moreover, for the first time, significant numbers of noblemen began to attend universities. In the Middle Ages a university degree seemed superfluous to members of the nobility. As efficient engines of social mobility, universities were in a sense a force that challenged the nobility’s social dominance; if students of rank attended at all, they generally did not take degrees because these could lessen their rank.44 Monastic culture, by contrast, was highly aristocratic, so medieval monks’ diatribes against worldly wisdom and their mocking descriptions of scholars as arrogant purveyors of irrelevant knowledge were also expressions of upper-class interests.45 Attendance figures for aristocratic students rose for

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the first time in the last decades of the fifteenth century, perhaps because the nobility were set on “regaining lost ground in state and church in the only way open to them, in view of the severe competition from a bourgeoisie now self-confident in the social and economic spheres and increasingly well educated at school and university.”46 The increasing numbers of upper-class students also reflects the fact that society was no longer fully feudalistic; members of the nobility were increasingly convinced that their prosperity was tied to their ability to serve a centralized ruler – not as warriors, but as universitytrained administrators or courtiers. This history explains why a nobleman like Pole attended Oxford, where he was a member of Magdalen College. Not much is known about his education there, though he may have been tutored by Thomas Linacre, a man trained in Italy and steeped in the erudition the Italians were famous for.47 During these years Pole met Thomas More (who wrote his daughter Margaret that Pole had admired the Latin in one of her letters) and perhaps John Colet.48 Going on to the university in Padua was a natural next step, for the same reasons that going to Oxford made sense. But Pole did not matriculate in the studium at Padua, and there is no evidence that he was an active student in any of its universities – this despite the fact that in Padua, unlike nearby Venice, there were no other major institutions to draw his attention, and seemingly not much else going on.49 Pole’s experience in Padua thus points to the presence of an intellectual community that existed apart from universities – a community with its own, noninstitutional, criteria for status. The simplest way to describe this community is to equate it with humanism, but this is misleading insofar as it reinforces the common tendency to assume that humanism emerged in opposition to the intellectual culture that developed within universities.50 The word humanista, which appears in one of its earliest uses in a 1490 letter from a rector of the University of Pisa, indicates that the studia humanitatis found a place in the universities.51 Many contemporaries perceived humanism as a reform movement within universities, and Walter Ruëgg concludes that by 1500 humanism had conquered university culture.52 This is not to say that humanism was the only game in town, as the strident (albeit hyperbolic) feud between humanists and scholastics attests, but it means that humanism marked an evolution within the universities rather than simply an alternative to them.53 It is also true, however, that even as humanism prevailed in the universities, humanists could rise into the top ranks of literati without any university training or degree whatsoever.54 In this nonacademic context (without religious vows, exams, degree requirements, or faculty or student organizations) humanistically trained scholars were wholly dependent on each other not only for knowledge but for identity.55 Still, the fact that some of these types

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of scholars learned and worked outside of universities does not in itself mean that they created a distinct kind of intellectual identity. Strictly speaking, the course of classical studies known as human letters, or studia humanitatis, produced students knowledgeable in grammar and rhetoric, and their ability to write and speak well made them useful as secretaries and (if they had the proper academic credentials) notaries. But these jobs, along with the work of doctors and lawyers who were also humanistically trained, had been done for pay by university-trained intellectuals throughout the Middle Ages. After all, as Jacques Le Goff argues, being an intellectual became a distinctive vocation in the eleventh century, and even then their success was based on their ability to present themselves as “sellers of words.”56 Scholars – and there are many of them – who are not content to claim that humanists simply taught different texts and topics, argue that humanism spawned a new kind of intellectual with a new worldview. Though there have been some interesting attempts to analyze the distinctiveness of humanism in terms of existential quandaries (by William Bouwsma, Richard Lanham, and Thomas F. Mayer, among others), this argument traditionally has focused on the much debated but still enduring claim that humanist learning fostered the ideology of “civic humanism.”57 Others – notably Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton – have cast these new claims in a less positive light, arguing that humanism enjoyed widespread success because it served the interests of the ruling classes. By encouraging a docile attitude toward authority and confirming the notion that speech was an indelible marker of social superiority, humanism taught people how to fit into an increasingly rigid hierarchical society.58 This debate is valuable because it rightly focuses attention on how humanism influenced social attitudes, but as a description of how humanism engendered a new intellectual identity, it is frustratingly tautological. Social perceptions of usefulness always determine the status of universities and would-be scholars. The more promising route to comprehending what was distinctive about sixteenth-century intellectuals’ self-understanding – and the ambivalence at the heart of it – is to follow Max Weber’s lead and focus on the fact that humanists wrote poetry, something that might not seem as noteworthy to us as Weber’s comparative analysis of intellectuals suggests it ought to. Petrarch (1304–1374), the model humanist, affirmed his reputation as a great intellectual by being crowned poet laureate, and as humanism became more widespread, princes began to establish professorships for poetics.59 Humanists viewed poetry as the broadest category of human knowledge, and the poet, not the orator, as the highest representative of the studia humanitatis.60 This does not mean that they were committed to an ethereal genre. Poetry

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could be burlesque entertainment or a kind of political communication that honored great deeds and people; Weber emphasizes that humanistic poets sought to fulfill the role of political advisor by presenting themselves as memorialists – as people who could bring to life “the language monuments of the remote past” in service to present regimes.61 In his study about professions in the Renaissance, Douglas Biow develops what could be read as a more expansive version of Weber’s thesis (though he does not seem to have had Weber in mind as he did so). Biow argues that humanists created a new professional identity, and poetry was the mark of their innovation. He goes on to explain how this commitment to poetry created a particular kind of quandary.62 Petrarch, as Biow explains, used his expertise as a poet to claim a distinct cultural and intellectual authority, thereby defining his profession against the university and the church, the two dominant institutions of his day. Petrarch presented the poet as both different than and equal to the priest, and construed humanism as a transformation of the monastic ideal.63 Differing from Weber – who simply notes that unlike their counterparts in China, Western intellectuals failed to become politically powerful – Biow argues that the humanists were stymied by their own ambivalence. Petrarch thus denied the very social status he claimed as the greatest poet in the land by asserting that poetry was in a realm apart – wholly different than other institutionalized professional activities. Biow attributes this move to Petrarch’s conviction that poetry had a “unique indebtedness to discursive play.”64 This point can be made directly relevant to our story if we extend it a bit: Petrarch and other humanists saw poetry as true theology. Many viewed it not just as a distinctive kind of language (“discursive play”) but as a particular kind of knowledge – knowledge of God. Even as they forswore claims to be possessors of secret or technical theological knowledge, humanist intellectuals presented themselves not just as sellers of words, but as producers of language that expressed transcendent truth. In Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle’s characteristically pithy terms, Petrarch asserted “that he practiced an art that was sacred by a genius divinely endowed.”65 In claiming to be the practitioner of a sacred art, Petrarch affirmed that he valued the spiritual over the worldly, that the very skills that gave him prestige rendered prestige unimportant. As Petrarch’s younger contemporary, the humanist Coluccio Salutati, claimed, the “intrinsic meaning [of the poet] accords with the theological truth.”66 In any case, the same ambivalence Petrarch showcased as he claimed and denied a professional identity also lurked in the sixteenth-century intellectuals studied here. This is not to say that it was rooted in their poetry alone – although with the exception of Contarini, all of our main characters wrote poetry. Erasmus wrote over 140 poems, and even though in 1495 he

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dismissed his early poems as trivial verse, he continued to write and publish many of them. Among More’s earliest writings were several English poems he wrote for specific occasions. They circulated anonymously, but he published some epigrams under his own name in 1518, at the same time that Utopia came out.67 Pole, Colonna, and other members of their circle also wrote poems, leading Thomas Mayer to conclude that an “unstable mix of poetry and piety characterized nearly everyone in Pole’s Viterbo circle and the spirituali more generally.”68 Even apart from their poetry, though, the men and women of letters studied in this book represent a later manifestation – and intensification – of Petrarch’s ambivalence, because they tried to write of God without formal theological language and without being licensed theologians. We will look more closely at their ways of writing about God in subsequent chapters, but at this point the important thing is to register that they forged an intellectual identity and community outside of an institutional context – and to clarify how they did so. What will become clear is that they perpetuated Petrarch’s ambivalence by laying claim simultaneously to salvific meaning and to prestige.

although pole pursued his education outside the university, this does not suggest (as it would have two centuries earlier) that men of rank did not get university degrees; instead it shows that both the education and the prestige he sought could be supplied by an independent network of learned men – men who impressed upon him both the notion that learning was spiritual as well as vocational, and (not coincidentally) the tendency to value friendship and study over their political or professional work. In Padua, Pole’s main tutor was Niccolo` Leonico Tomeo – a professional academic who in many ways disavowed professional life. Born in Venice to Greek parents, Leonico was a devoted scholar of Aristotle and Plato and a main instigator of the Hellenic Renaissance at Padua. Though he had received a doctorate from Padua and held an extraordinary chair there for a time, his position seemed to have lapsed: By the time Pole arrived, there is no evidence that Leonico was an active faculty member, and like Pole he tutored students privately. Leonico was dismayed by the widespread ignorance of Aristotelian science, which he blamed on greed and the fact that the university structure led students to seek careers in law and medicine because they were the most profitable fields. Though the war of the League of Cambrai closed the universities in Padua between 1509 and 1516 and Leonico was always eager for news, he showed little political ambition or interest. Apart from his studies, his time was devoted to writing letters to his extensive network of friends

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and students. His correspondents included not only all the leading English students of new learning who came to Italy, but also the French scholar and religious thinker Guillaume Budé and prominent religious reformers in Italy, including Gasparo Contarini and Gian Matteo Giberti. Erasmus identified Leonico, along with Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), as one of the leading lights in the contemporary constellation of scholars.69 Leonico went to work right away, not by teaching Pole but by inducting him into the community of literati. For example, the first surviving letter from him to Pole invites the young scholar to go with him to church. Leonico assures Pole that the sermon is worth their time by explaining that the preacher is a young boy reputed to be one of the best orators in town. Fast on the heels of this letter, he writes another describing his recent visit to Bembo – a letter designed to inform Pole of Bembo’s exalted rank among the literati and the interactive ideal of their learned circle. Leonico clearly thought that a tutor was not supposed to just impart a specific body of knowledge, but instead was responsible for socializing and initiating his students into a community and its values. Bembo was a Venetian aristocrat, son of a renowned politician and intellectual, and although his father had two doctorates, Bembo took the other route to humanist prominence by studying with tutors and other humanists and earning the attention of the future Pope Leo X by translating Greek texts and writing poetry in Latin and Italian. After spending several years in the prestigious post of papal secretary (1513–1519), he retreated to his villa near Padua and declared his desire to live and study away from courts. He took holy orders in 1522 (though there is no evidence that this changed his relationship with the woman with whom he had three children). He was appointed historiographer of Venice in 1529 and became cardinal in 1539, and yet even as he remained active in public affairs, the villa – rather than any court – remained his primary residence and a protected and privileged space for the next twenty years.70 He set to work on his treatise about the Italian language (Prose della volgar lingua [1525]), the work for which he is best known, and initially resisted the Venetian attempt to give him the position of historiographer by claiming, “I am quite removed from the kind of life and the public actions that are largely the matter of history, both through choice and in giving myself to study and because my ecclesiastical position separates me from them.” He seems to have been a priest the way Petrarch was a priest: It was a source of benefices, not a career; he did not have pastoral responsibilities for a parish or diocese; and he had a family. Yet he did not see himself as a courtier or statesman either; instead he insisted on his distance from the realm of politics because he associated that sphere with treachery, hypocrisy, and the

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lust for power.71 In a sense, then, his studies and his “ecclesiastical position” were similar in that they both demarcated a separate realm rather than specific professional duties. So as Leonico narrates in his letter to Pole, at a gathering at Bembo’s villa, friends avidly discussed the relative merits of Latin and Italian and then, finding themselves at an impasse, agreed to submit written opinions to Bembo, who adjudicated by issuing a written opinion after pondering their arguments.72 Referring to Leonico’s letters, Jonathan Woolfson observes that “‘meaning’ resides in the ‘event’ of the letter itself, and in the friendship and sense of common endeavour which it betokens.”73 This elegant observation assumes the answer to a question that still needs to be asked, however: What motivated the people involved to form friendships and to perceive themselves as part of a common endeavor? As we can see by paying attention to how the participants navigated between different standards of status and merit, the participants created a community amongst themselves in contradistinction to, and in some sense because of, the other communities to which they belonged. Bembo, for example, wrote to Pole after a mutual friend, Christopher Longolius, gave him several of Pole’s letters. In a tone both respectful and paternalistic, Bembo insisted that he esteemed Pole, in a sense, automatically because of his noble birth, but that he loved him all the more because he had come to Padua to seek knowledge in the company of the most learned men. By beginning with a reference to Pole’s status as an aristocrat – as someone who was closely aligned to a powerful king – Bembo alluded to the reason why a highly respected fifty-year-old humanist would write an admiring letter to a visiting English student in his twenties. By detailing the reasons he found Pole’s studies and use of language praiseworthy, though, Bembo simultaneously asserted his own power to judge whether Pole was a worthy scholar.74 These kinds of exchanges created a communal identity that displaced rank – though not completely.75 Longolius’s presence in this tableau underscores that the ideals Bembo imputed to the community were constructed in opposition to other possibilities. Two years earlier, the Flemish scholar had arrived in Rome. Thanks to his skills as a Ciceronian and his friendship with the papal secretaries Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto, Longolius was soon approved for honorary Roman citizenship. This, however, produced a swift backlash among Roman humanists who resented the foreigner’s quick ascent. Noting that he had once written a panegyric that claimed the Franks were the true heirs of classical Roman culture, the humanists conducted a rowdy kangaroo court that one participant believed would have turned into a murderous mob if Longolius had been in

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the audience.76 The anger and pettiness were both familiar and frustrating for scholars who envisioned themselves as part of an exalted sodality, and these blatant displays of discord remind us that scholars’ assumptions about their shared values and goals were often illusory – and yet for all that, no less dearly held. Longolius and Pole became close friends, though the Flemish scholar died early, in 1522, and the interest in rhetoric that they shared was yet another source of scholarly controversies. Longolius, who left Pole his extensive library of Greek and Latin sources, wrote letters about Pole’s interest in politics and daily schedule of study. A short biography that appeared in 1524 records Longolius’s request to Pole that “after my death, you lend your memory and goodwill humanly and piously to me as our close friendship demands.”77 Though the biography is anonymous, Mayer has convincingly argued that it was written by Pole.78 If so, Longolius’s request is doubly poignant, for despite Longolius’s frequent requests, Pole was absent when he died. This incident reflects a dynamic we will explore in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4: In this intellectual community, the sense that friendships were created and maintained in written texts – that writing conveyed presence and enabled intimacy – sometimes clashed with intense claims that only physical presence could satisfy a friend’s desire.79 The biography is, moreover, the only work that showcases Pole’s ability to write in Ciceronian Latin – a style that Erasmus famously mocked, with Longolius as his central villain, in the 1525 dialogue, Ciceronianus. Pole’s own connection to Erasmus was forged several years later, in 1529, when in a letter to Erasmus, Thomas Lupset (c. 1498?–1530) heralded Pole (as a scholar, not a Ciceronian, and as a potentially useful friend for the Dutch humanist). The son of a goldsmith, Lupset had been Erasmus’s student at Cambridge and later was part of Pole’s household in Padua. But Lupset and Erasmus had fallen out of touch, and Lupset offered his description of Pole to his former tutor as a kind of gift of reconciliation after a long hiatus in their relationship. Lupset explained that Pole often spoke favorably about Erasmus and would be a valuable ally against Erasmus’s many enemies. Lupset punctuated this claim to Pole’s usefulness by assuring Erasmus that Pole was a worthy colleague. Consider, Erasmus (and no one could appreciate the point better than you) what it means for this young man, who is still in his twenty-fifth year, to have made a careful study of all the surviving works of Aristotle, working under the most distinguished teachers . . . and not only to have read and reread all the writings of

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Plato, but to have built on this foundation a calm steadiness of mind and character which remains sure and unchanging in face of all the hazards and assaults of chance and nature . . . and on top of all this to have demonstrated unmistakably his excellence in all the liberal arts.80

In this way, Lupset linked specific knowledge, stoic virtue, and intellectual status. Although he concluded his list of Pole’s accomplishments by noting that Pole was one of Henry VIII’s relatives, he sandwiched this reference to Pole’s close association with powerful patrons between claims about Pole’s character and scholarship. Erasmus, too, emphasized this alternative system of values (rather than proximity to political power) when he, prompted by Lupset, wrote to Pole and explained that he was delighted that Pole was among those who had emerged “to defend and promote the cause of literature and piety.”81 These connections between Bembo, Leonico, Pole, Lupset, and Erasmus show how the network wove itself together in a three-dimensional field, plotting its points of contact along three different axes simultaneously: hierarchical social power and prestige; moral virtue; and scholarly accomplishment. This complex calculation inspired numerous debates; even more importantly, the difficulty involved in balancing the virtues of friendship and scholarship with the quest for social advantage often engendered uncertainty and anxiety about whether it could be done at all.

by folding nobility and social power into a notion of prestige that prioritized meaning (the “cause of literature and piety”), the community transformed the importance of rank and created a situation where intellectual identity, more than family background, determined the kind of ambivalence men of letters felt about the public sphere. Thus for those doing the calculations, their own birth rank was not the determining factor even though they lived at a time when nobility had become more important.82 We can illustrate this point by glancing briefly at Pole’s nonaristocratic friend Jacopo Sadoleto (1477–1547). Sadoleto’s father had consolidated his family’s position as part of the new bourgeoisie of Ferrara and Modena in Italy by studying law, but Sadoleto himself, sent to the University of Ferrara to do the same, chose instead to concentrate on Latin literature. He was able to translate that knowledge into a career in the church, and thanks to his reputation as a great Ciceronian he rose to the position of papal secretary. Like Bembo, he subsequently spent years away from Rome before becoming a cardinal in the late 1530s. It was no accident that humanists like Sadoleto and Bembo gravitated to the papal court in Rome, because around 1500 it became the leading center of

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culture and money in Italy.83 As humanism entered what Christian Bec calls its “courtly” phase, aristocratic courts in places like Milan, Ferrara, Florence, Venice, and Genoa – like the Tudor court in England – were also attractive destinations because they had resources to spend on humanists who performed well as debonair courtiers, secretaries, and diplomats.84 But by the 1520s, the papal court faced new financial and political challenges (not to mention the more distant problem instigated by Luther). Three relatively austere popes significantly reduced the generous standard of patronage set by Julius II (1503–1513), and the Imperial armies threatened to invade, which they finally did with chaotic brutality in 1527.85 Sadoleto missed this cataclysmic event, the so-called Sack of Rome, but just barely. In April, just weeks before the invaders breached the walls, he set off for Provence, determined to devote himself to his studies. His destination was the diocese in Carpentras from which he had long collected benefices. As reformers frequently complained, holders of benefices derived from bishoprics were not obligated to perform the duties of a resident bishop, and in explaining his decision to live in his diocese, Sadoleto spoke as much about what he wanted to study as about what he planned to do as a pastor. In a telling contrast of terms, he wrote that he would “dutifully” fulfill his pastoral obligations, but he planned to “wallow” in books and “slake” his thirst for learning.”86 Safely in Carpentras after the Sack, Sadoleto attributed the pope’s woes to bad counselors who had “twisted” his mind (recalling the concern about good and bad counsel that we saw also in More and Erasmus), and he maintained hope that Pope Clement would recover his integrity by “trusting in himself.” Meanwhile, Sadoleto sought to define his own source of integrity. He defended the choice to leave Clement in the breach by explaining that he remained obligated to his “terrestrial patron” (the pope) but “even more obligated” to the “other, greater Lord.” In a study of humanist responses to the Sack, Kenneth Gouwens concludes that by presenting it as a clear choice between two incommensurate lords, Sadoleto “sidesteps entirely the rather obvious point that service to the pope was itself a means of serving God.”87 But this imagery of a man stepping to the side is misleading. Sadoleto confronted, albeit while ducking and feinting, the possibility that a conflict existed where he had not seen one before. What he faced, in other words, was exactly what Gouwens suggested he avoided: the notion that serving the church or any worldly ruler did not in fact constitute service to God. To Pietro Bembo he wrote that he now viewed the life of a papal curialist as a life of bondage (servitus – the same word Hytholoday uses to describe courtiers in Utopia), and explained that he had given up his career in Rome for “those letters and the study of the noblest arts through which we have the means to know ourselves and come closer to

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God.”88 Thus the move was the culmination of a long-standing tension: As pressure increased on intellectual culture in Rome, Sadoleto was driven to a dramatic choice (or so he framed it); the impending invasion was the tipping point, just as Henry’s insistence on getting an opinion about the divorce would be for Pole.

sadoleto was stricken by the loss of his books en route to Carpentras (a loss that so undid him he claimed he had suffered more than a friend whose writings had been destroyed in the Sack of Rome),89 but he set to work nevertheless, writing exegetical works, a defense of philosophy, an interpretation of Paul’s letters to the Romans, and a pedagogical treatise. Pole, with whom he had corresponded (thanks to Bembo’s introduction) since the 1520s, arrived for a visit in 1532, and as he departed, Sadoleto gave him a copy of the pedagogical work and asked for comment.90 Pole’s first letter of response called Sadoleto to task for writing an entire treatise about education without mentioning theology. That would have been fine in ancient times, but “the ancient world did not know of the more tranquil port for our souls that was opened for us by God himself and found by the son of God, who led us there.” Truly learned men are now distinguished by the knowledge that there is more to heaven and earth than Plato or Aristotle imagined.91 In the subsequent exchange of letters, the two men rehearsed standard arguments about Christian versus pagan knowledge and rhetoric versus philosophy, but what often reads like a boilerplate debate was actually a sustained discussion about community – and, more specifically, about whether the community of pious literati could help its members balance the demands of social prestige with the desire for spiritual meaning. To Pole’s contention that he had not mentioned the need to study God, Sadoleto responded by asserting his own professional credentials as a rhetorician and teacher. He agreed that ancient knowledge has been superseded, but asserted that his training enabled him to recognize also that philosophical and theological knowledge has to be parceled out, in stages. Students should be extensively trained in philosophy up to age twenty-five before being exposed to theology, he said, and they should be educated by rhetoricians who recognize, for example, that it was best to end rather than begin a work about philosophy with the “ornament” of theology, “since then it will be more pleasant (jucundius) if new to the ears of men.”92 Those who would teach must think about when and why people learn, he said, and this means they necessarily must prioritize pragmatic calculations over abstract claims. Rhetoricians, in other words, rightly navigate in a realm where appearances matter. The social

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status implications of this commitment to rhetoric were unavoidable: In dismay Sadoleto asked, “What if ornamentation is removed from speech, why not then from custom (a moribus)?” Acknowledging that custom is not strictly synonymous with virtue, he nevertheless insisted that these behaviors were invaluable tools of social differentiation, for it is the “movement, gestures, the tone of voice and the appearance of the face, by which one can discern educated from uncultured men.”93 Elsewhere, in his work about philosophy, Sadoleto affirmed that custom and consensus are intellectually essential because they naturalize ideas and enable people to judge the rightness and wrongness of principles such as justice. Here, then, he makes an analogous point when he affirms that status inevitably, and rightly, was based on how people represented themselves – how they spoke, moved, and gestured.94 Pole, too, was interested in appearances. He did not dismiss out of hand the standards of prestige associated with classically inflected rhetoric and philosophy even as he tried to prioritize other values. Consequently, he was less interested in defining disciplines (whether theology or philosophy or rhetoric) than in differentiating between worthy and unworthy forms of work – between spiritual scholarship and the status-driven acquisition of knowledge. Thus, having parsed the issue in one way by presenting a theologian’s critique of rhetoric, he changed tactics and presented himself as a philosopher interested in good rhetoric but dismayed by “mere grammarians.” To differentiate good from bad forms of rhetoric, he described his unhappiness with his tutor and housemate, the well-known rhetorician Lazarus Bonamico. He explains that he was originally motivated to ask Bonamico to tutor him by the fear that he was losing his scholarly edge. “When I try to convey my thoughts to my friends,” Pole explained, “I am often stymied.” His inability to write well or to communicate effectively was a source of shame, and Pole attributed the problem to the fact that he had spent years away from classical Latin texts, reading Christian theologians. “But what should I do?” he asked plaintively, “You know . . . how imperious [these studies] are, how they do not easily admit the company of other studies.”95 Back in Italy, Pole nevertheless hoped that the exclusivity was not absolute, and tried to renew his familiarity with “those most elegant letters” by studying with Bonamico. Pole found the experience disappointing, however. He soon decided that Bonamico could not teach him much, and he complained that rhetoricians seemed content to view their field as a workshop (officina) for grammarians. The problem with rhetoric, Pole concluded, was not that people wrongly exalted it above Christian studies, but that they did not honor it enough; they were content to work as artisans, on a craft that barely deserved to be called intellectual. “What can the literature of Orators or Poets offer,

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either of dignity or utility,” Pole demands, “when compared to the books of philosophers?”96 Pole, initially aghast that Sadoleto let philosophy dominate Christian territory, now declared himself dismayed by this “injury to philosophy.” Rhetoricians ought to set their sights higher, and Sadoleto, whom Pole pointedly described as a “patron of philosophy” (Philosophiae ipsius patronum), should ask more of his fellow rhetoricians. By describing his dissatisfaction with Bonamico in these terms, Pole both staked a claim in the issue of professional identity and demonstrated how difficult it was to sort out the relationship between status and spiritual value. Pole expected Bonamico to be not only a teacher of eloquent speech but also a leader in the search for God. He was deeply disappointed to find that Bonamico was content with superficial, pleasant studies, and he was disturbed by the corresponding ways that Bonamico’s inadequacies highlighted the gap between the pursuit of salvific knowledge and the world of appearances. Nevertheless, he found it difficult to disentangle status, intimacy, and religious ideals. For instance, though as a nobleman Pole outranked Bonamico in social terms, he considered Bonamico his superior in age and scholarly prestige and hesitated to criticize the tutor directly: “Nor does it seem proper, when I consider my years and lack of learning (tenuitatem doctrinae) and lack of judgment, to admonish a man of that age, that most literate man of letters, to admonish him however prudently about the type of life he leads.”97 Readers might readily sympathize with Pole’s desire to avoid a confrontation, but his justification has a historically specific significance because it shows how intellectual status could disrupt class hierarchy and complicate any attempts to draw clear distinctions between spiritual values and social utility. Thus Pole, who emphasized the importance of remaining respectful toward a man whose work he did not respect, gave two different reasons why Sadoleto, his elder by more than twenty years, should do the job for him: He thought Sadoleto ought to guide Bonamico because he was the rhetorician’s superior, with greater intellectual prestige, and also because, as loving friends, they were equals.98 As this vignette suggests, the overlapping criteria of status and intimacy were remarkably difficult to separate. What the distinctions between friendship and social and professional status lacked in clarity they gained in urgency. “You were,” Pole explained to Sadoleto, “firmly impressed upon my heart even before I met you in person because I perceived that the most esteemed men had the highest opinion of your virtue and knowledge.” Moreover, Pole insisted that he knew Sadoleto intimately, that their conversations and Sadoleto’s writings had made it possible for him to know both the intellectual and the spiritual (interiora ornamenta animi) qualities his friend possessed. Sadoleto likewise noted approvingly that after

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Pole arrived in Italy he sought out the “most distinguished and learned” men and that he did so with “affection and friendship” – a characterization designed to erase the vision of Pole as a calculating interloper. Esteemed men were, according to Sadoleto, drawn to Pole because of his admirable personal qualities – not only his “skill and learning” but also his “faith and the integrity or purity (integritatem) of his life.”99 And, Sadoleto explained, he was able to trust or believe in (statuere poteram) Pole because the Englishman had proven himself worthy through his devotion to learning. The etymological link between Sadoleto’s verb, statuere, and the word “status” underscores the fact that intimacy was grounded in social standing. Yet Sadoleto’s description of Pole invoked the image of Christ and the way his early followers challenged established social structures: Pole was praiseworthy because “enflamed by zeal and love of the best arts,” he had been willing to leave “friends, family, and native land” to go to Italy. With these sorts of images of themselves and each other, men like Pole and Sadoleto claimed to be part of a community, linked not by inherited kinship and loyalties, but by shared zeal and love. Theirs was a community fully intertwined with the social order, but aspiring also to be set apart.100 Thus these affirmations of respect and love were interspersed with anxious questions about the relationship between affection and rational calculations. When Pole protested that Sadoleto’s praise for him was exaggerated, Sadoleto responded by assuming that the question at hand was whether his praise was based on love or judgment. He claimed to be using good judgment, then repudiated the dichotomy: “But I release myself from all these sorts of disputations. I acknowledge that everything I said about you I said from love, but it was a love based on a true and pure judgment.”101 This latent uneasiness about how to reconcile friendship and intellectual credibility runs throughout their letters, and Sadoleto’s insistence that the two were not opposed suggests a fear that they might be. By the same token, the disclaimers that introduced Sadoleto’s response to Pole’s critique were not idle musings but articulations of the most urgent issues they faced: Now if I told you truly what I feel, would you attribute it to my judgment or benevolence toward you? Would that I were able to express in words what is fixed in my soul. I am not afraid of the suspicion of being too fond of you (non vereor nimium amantis suspicionem). I am going to try to tell you what I mean, but if I fail the attempt will not destroy the memories of your qualities which I learned to know when we were together – those qualities that you continuously conveyed by your countenance, speech, your quite holy and modest behavior. Considering the quality of your life and the testimony of other men, and especially the feeling

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I got from our time together, I carry you in my soul, even though the chance of observing and gaining from you was too scarce because you had to leave so quickly.”102

Their friendship, itself made possible by a larger community, allowed them to communicate without suspicion. But the mix of admiration, social respect, and feeling reinforced rather than resolved the problem of whether judgment or affection should be preferred. These two men assumed that analytic discussions were unthinkable between those who had no personal bonds: The art of communication should be used to express intimate thoughts, the contents of one’s soul. Yet these same discussions threatened to cleave the very relationships they constituted, because they raised the specter of status and thereby the notion that professional judgment rather than love should be the prevailing emotion. Within the framework of standard arguments about rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, Pole and Sadoleto consequently found themselves tripping on a sprawling uncertainty about the relationship between professional standing and spiritual work. The image of learned men that they both set their sites on began to shimmer like a mirage under the intensity of the questions they faced about the relationship between spiritual and intellectual life – as they engaged, in essence, in a debate about whether their intellectual community was imbued with spiritual value.

religious schism and communal standards The stakes of this interest in the learned community were exposed in the stark light of religious schism – not just the disciplinary or intellectual stakes that Erika Rummel reveals in her work on the humanist-scholastic debate and the confessionalization of humanism, but the spiritual stakes as well.103 So when Sadoleto took on Calvin in 1539, years after this exchange with Pole, he proclaimed that the people of Geneva faced a choice between two kinds of intellectuals: men of “greatest wisdom and holiness” who had transmitted Christian truth throughout the ages; and the arrogant leaders who had introduced innovations and liked to show off their “towering intellect or ingenuity.” Sadoleto conceded that these latter kinds of men dignified “their fraud and malice with the noble, indeed, but false and inappropriate (alieno) name of learning and wisdom,” but he hoped to oppose them with a knowledge rooted in humility, and ideas so “bright and clear” that they gave no shelter to fraud or error.104 The fact that Sadoleto’s letter to the Genevans was written in Latin, a language most of them could not read, is only the most obvious evidence that

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despite his stated goal to guide the “literate and illiterate” alike back to the truth, he was primarily interested in affirming the integrity of learned men. John Calvin, Geneva’s religious leader, invoked this same standard of integrity in his written reply to Sadoleto when he conceded that he would seem hateful to other learned men if it was passion rather than a “just cause” that motivated him to attack a scholar like Sadoleto – a scholar, Calvin noted, whom others rightly loved and honored because of his accomplishments in literature. Thus Sadoleto based his appeal to this shared standard when he argued that intellectuals who challenged the church not only undermined the catholicity of the institution and deviated from tradition, but also strayed from the spiritual values that true intellectuals were supposed to uphold.105 For Pole, the same problem was posed by More’s death. On the one hand, More and the other martyrs represented an alternative epistemology, the knowledge gained through faith and the truth that “shines in them in some way different from that in which it shines for those who use only the light of reason.”106 Their deaths not only commemorated Christ’s death, but also testify that Christ alone, not faulty human knowledge, brings salvation. The martyrs are themselves “living books,” written in blood. Even the words of Scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit, are superseded by the words of the martyrs: Nevertheless, as the original always has greater authority than all other things that are then described in books, so also these books written in the blood of martyrs are to be preferred to all others. These were the original books in which the finger of God appeared. The hand of man appears in all others that were written with ink on paper. Although the hand of man followed the hand of God and could not err, nevertheless it has less dignity and is subject to more accidents. The books can be distorted by the perverse reasoning and interpretation of men and can be imagined in many forms.107

This alternative epistemology is universal and certain, unlike intellectual knowledge, which is partial and elitist. On the other hand, the martyrs’ efficacy as divine conduits is inseparable from their intellectual prestige.108 More and Fisher were the “most learned men this Island has ever produced these many centuries” and they were, moreover, among the most knowledgeable and saintly men that the church has had “for many ages now.” Their beliefs were validated by their scholarship and corroborated not only by tradition but by their contemporaries – by the “common agreement of greatly learned men.”109 They were then simultaneously models for an alternative community and exemplars for all who claimed to be learned. By condemning More and Fisher, Henry jettisoned not

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only whatever he had gained from his own education but also his standing as a great patron of intellectuals. He demonstrated his unworthiness by seeking approval rather than truth from the intellectuals he consulted. The threats and bribes that Henry used to influence theologians in Paris and Italy to support his divorce showed that educated men could be motivated by crass desires, but Pole remained confident that truth was still to be found among the educated. “General agreement,” absent obvious manipulation, provided the validation Henry craved – and forfeited.110 Pole’s conviction that men of letters possessed both knowledge and a socially sanctioned prestige thereby coexisted with his desire to endorse an alternative kind of knowledge and a different kind of status. Though he emphasized the idealized alternative, he was not willing to cede status to Henry’s minions. Thus Richard Sampson – the man who had penned a theological defense of Henry – came in for the fiercest critique because his claims to intellectual status, epistemological truth, and religious righteousness directly challenged Pole’s hope that all three could be possessed by the right kind of intellectual. In the midst of his letter to Henry, Pole derided Sampson: “Truly your ignorance of the plans of God renders your cleverness of little avail.” By addressing Sampson directly he underscored that this was, at root, a debate between men of letters about what made their work valuable and meaningful.111 Sampson, the rationalist, was an arrogant fool like all thinkers who put faith in their own minds: “Now, like a grave and leisurely philosopher, he searches for the reason for this. . . . Sampson says that everything should be conceded to him for this reason alone. Human right entitles him to assert his superiority so confidently.” Pole interlaced this polemical strategy with another approach that conflates knowledge, reason, and virtue in order to dismiss Sampson as inadequate rather than misguided. The problem with Sampson and his cohorts was not their use of reason, but the particular way that they used it. Pole insulted them as “subtle logicians” who cannot think clearly: “They show this by reaching absurd conclusions through a malicious method of argument. They speak absurdities of this kind: Man is not man; man is an ass; every man is one man.” Pole presents himself as one who upholds a legitimate type of reason that prioritizes clarity and common sense. In this struggle over the identity of the intellectual community, the uneducated have no place. Although Pole’s treatise culminated by celebrating faith as the unique source of certain truth, he did not personify this with vivid appeals to faithful, unlearned Christians who would seem to be the best counterexample for his attack on intellectual presumption. When Pole invoked the marginalized or the unlettered he did so only abstractly, and his references to this category of people were usually undermined by the specific examples

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he cited. For instance, he begins his praise of religious order by appealing to “any among you unskilled in literary studies.” He says that the truth conveyed by martyrdom gives the uneducated knowledge that allows them to repudiate “those literary men of yours [Henry], swollen up with pride as they are in their new doctrines.”112 But when Pole personified this by naming a particular monk who was martyred (Richard Reynolds, whom Pole refers to as “Reginaldo”), his focus was again on the learned. As in his presentation of More and Fisher, Pole assumed that virtue and learning are inseparable. Reginaldo was outstanding in his asceticism, and “in the sanctity of his life he should be compared with the most preeminent among those who professed a manner of living in very strict accord with the norm of Christ.” His exemplarity was forged by his knowledge, however, because he “possessed something found in very few men of his kind; he possessed a cultivated knowledge of the liberal arts derived from their very own sources. For he had an excellent command of the three particular languages in which all the liberal arts are contained. He was the only one of all the English monks who knew these languages.” By emphasizing this monk’s linguistic skills and knowledge of the liberal arts, Pole appealed to a cultural presumption that the monk was admirable because of his scholarly training: “He seemed to lack nothing that would confirm the praise of his sanctity and learning for all time.”113 Though elsewhere in the work Pole valorizes stultitia or folly – a theme discussed in detail in Chapter 5 – here he does not exploit the Christian rhetoric of paradox and its powerful claim that the humility of the lowly confounds the hubris of the mighty – that the unlearned who know Christ will triumph over the intellectually arrogant and their false claims to knowledge. Instead Pole is pulled inexorably back to the more complicated question of how to differentiate between bad and good intellectuals. With the invocation of the monk, as in his paeans to More and Fisher, Pole affirms that the truth is known by those who study – and that those who have faith in the right kind of knowledge should now be confirmed in their confidence by the martyrdom of great scholars. Thomas More himself, of course, at the end of his life and under the imminent threat of death, confronted the question of whether sanctity had anything to do with learning. In his own attacks on heresy, More had confidently appealed to intellectual consensus, declaring, for example, that the interpretation of Scripture is rightly guaranteed “not by one doctor or twain” but by the “common agreement” of the holy church fathers.114 Condemning William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, More said he opposed it not least because by omitting glosses, Tyndale made it difficult for people to be guided by educated opinion. When More opposed Henry, however, he contravened

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the judgment of most intellectuals in England. As a prisoner in the Tower of London, More found himself “tempted” by the logic he had used against Tyndale when his daughters argued that it would not be wrong for him to take the oath because it was judged permissible by “many great wise and well learned men.”115 The exchange between More and his daughters about this issue began with an August 1534 letter from More’s stepdaughter Alice Alington to Margaret, reporting that her attempts to get help from a prominent visitor had failed because (the man assured her) More’s objection to the oath was a “mere scruple.” The man marveled at More’s obstinacy, for “everyone” else, he explained, agreed that there was no problem with the oath. Suggesting that More’s learning must be the root of the problem, he pronounced himself happy to be a man who knew little, and indicted More by quoting one Aesopic fable about fools and another about an overly scrupulous ass. Anyone who stands apart from the crowd, even a crowd of fools, risks looking foolish himself. Thus the wise men in the fable who shield themselves from the rain that drenches everyone else are laughable because the knowledge they preserved is thereby rendered irrelevant, as More himself may well be in his stubborn insistence that spiritual knowledge is more important than worldly engagement.116 The status of foolishness is ambiguous here, however, because – as Margaret reports in her subsequent letter to Alice about a conversation she had with More after he had read Alice’s letter – More both proudly claims the label of fool (citing, as Erasmus had years earlier, the pun that linked the name “More” to the Greek word for fool) and rejects the primacy of foolish convention. But even as he claims the humble status of fool (drawing implicitly on the biblical claims that exalt those who are fools for God, and that promise God will “destroy the wisdom of the wise” as in 1 Corinthians 1 :19 and Isaiah 29:14), More engages Margaret in a debate about what motivates learned men.117 Margaret, herself renowned for learning, believed that the learned men who wanted to dissuade More from challenging Henry were inspired by good reasons rather than by a simple desire for consensus. More does not respond by asserting the superiority of his own foolishness. Although he observes that intellectuals are often wrong – many have, he notes, rejected true teachings such as the immaculate birth of Mary – he is ultimately unwilling to condemn educated men and women even if they reach conclusions that disagree with his own. Instead, he assures Margaret that he is not reckless and that his beliefs are not idiosyncratic because he can call on a community of literati: the knowledgeable and virtuous men, living and dead, throughout Christendom, and “holy doctors and saints” whose “books yet at this day remain here in men’s hands.”118 By citing these virtuous models, he both

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affirms the importance of the collective opinion of the learned and insists that their community needs a religious genealogy.119 Notably, More’s discussion about an ideal learned community was with a woman. For men of letters, as we have seen, women like Margaret More Roper signified something more complicated than withdrawal from the public into the private realm. This was certainly true in Pole’s case. One of Pole’s closest and most celebrated relationships was with Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547). In their own day, the friendship was investigated by inquisitors – not because ecclesial officials suspected a romance between the older widow and the unmarried man who (as Mayer points out) was more erotic and perhaps sexual with his male friends than with Colonna, but because they suspected the two (along with several other friends) of sympathizing with Lutheran teachings, including justification by faith. Pole’s subsequent biographers also have been intrigued by his relationship with Colonna, not only because most biographers share the inquisitors’ interest in Pole and Colonna’s theology, but also because they see Pole’s attraction to Colonna as a symptom of his feelings about public life. Mayer concludes that “Pole had political skills, but his passivity in the face of crisis constantly negated them. Instead of the confrontational behavior a high noble should have displayed when encountering opposition, Pole withdrew. Instead of defending his honour publicly against challenge from other men, Pole privately cultivated the congenial members of his household and spiritual relationships with women, above all Colonna.”120 This reference to women – so often invoked as symbols of a private realm – reinforces the dichotomy between public honor and private withdrawal. Colonna’s presence complicates any simple notion of withdrawal, though. Even more so than Roper, Colonna had a prominent public presence. She was widely lauded as an accomplished Petrarchan poet and as a tribute to the noble tradition of scholarship in Italy. As the member of a powerful noble family, she spent her childhood and married life in courts, including the court in Naples, surrounded by writers, artists, and well-known preachers such as Bernardino Ochino and Gian Matteo Giberti. Although her brother sided with imperial forces and even presided over an incursion into Rome (which included, among other things, ransacking Sadoleto’s study) Colonna was able to get an audience with the pope to champion the Capuchin order. She corresponded avidly not only with Pole but also with other cardinals and ecclesial and political leaders in Italy and beyond. After her husband’s death in 1525, Colonna lived primarily in convents, but she was not cloistered: She still traveled and often spent time with guests and friends. Thus Colonna does not signify withdrawal in the way we associate it with, say, a nun or a nineteenth-century housewife (two stereotyped images that reinforce our association of women with privacy). To talk

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of her as part of a circle of people inclined toward withdrawal is to highlight the close connection between retreat and engagement. This was the paradox that structured the lives of all of the characters in this study: They prioritized an alternative realm even as they were fully engaged in the world.121 Thus all of our characters have a narrative of conversion that involved repudiating the secular in order to focus on God. This was, as we saw in Chapter 1 , the way Erasmus and More proclaimed their devotion to God, and it recurs in the writings of Pole and his friends. Pole narrated the break with Henry as an event that prepared him to move from “human schools” to the “school of God.”122 Vittoria Colonna presented herself as transformed by explaining that she had relinquished her devotion to the classical muse in order to write only of God, and Gasparo Contarini identified the central crisis of his life with the decision to study Christian texts exclusively. Yet Pole and Contarini, like Bembo and Sadoleto, all waded into the swampy waters of ecclesial politics in the 1530s. Pole led several legations against Henry, took up a major administrative post for the church from 1541 –1547, and returned to England to preside as archbishop under Queen Mary until they both died on the same day in 1558. Through correspondence and conversations, Colonna followed the twists and turns of exchanges between Pole and Contarini and others as they pursued diplomatic overtures with the Lutherans and participated in discussions about a church council. Thus the notion our characters had of withdrawal was thoroughly interlaced with their experience of engagement. It is not, in other words, a natural expression of their piety, as Delio Cantimori argued long ago and other scholars since have echoed.123 Neither is it – as Mayer and others would have it – best understood as resistance.124 Withdrawal wrongly implies a clear boundary, and occludes the creative work involved in creating an alternative realm that was both shaped by and distinct from the world of patronage, political power, and scholarly prestige. Resistance too is misleading, because it suggests a direct counter-reaction. What they were doing instead was constructing an alternative – slowly, ambivalently, inconclusively – by transferring some values and setting themselves in opposition to others. Learned women signified precisely this combination. In the Italian and Northern European Renaissance, humanistically trained women wrote classically influenced poetry, philosophical treatises, and spiritual meditations, and they translated contemporary works into vernacular languages. They were patrons, friends of artists and writers, and correspondents in a day when intellectual culture was stitched together by letters. Negative assumptions about female nature – including the claim that only wanton women speak or write for public audiences – remained both omnipresent and adamant.125 At the

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same time there was also the widespread belief that women were particularly “inclinable to piety,”126 and they were not implicated in the world of public affairs.127 Thus theirs was the sanctified alternative that many learned men sought – not as ascetic hermits but as respected intellectuals. In this sense, women were central to the literati’s project of defining themselves as spiritual scholars. The inclusion of educated women indicated that the realm pious scholars associated with one another was distinctive, set apart from calculations of worldly advantage but still holding up standards of intellectual excellence and prestige.128 In other words, sanctity and learning became the terms of the quest because they were the terms of the problem. The structure of Christian society in the sixteenth century encouraged Catholic men and women of letters to separate the spiritual from the instrumental, the public from the private. That same structure made it difficult for them to do so, however. The virtue and knowledge they praised were qualities with both utilitarian and existential value. Elite Catholic literati therefore found themselves trying to affirm both simultaneously – to succeed not only as clients and patrons, as powerful agents of prestige and skillful players in the serious game of self-representation, but also as friends and fellow seekers, people who embodied the pure, pristine values that signified salvation. As they tried to clarify the boundaries of scholarly disciplines, and to distinguish the sycophantic client from the worthy writer, the monk from the professor, the loving friend from the judging critic, they revealed not only their own inability to pull away from the instrumental world of patrons and professionals but also their unrelenting need to do so. Moreover, as the next chapter will show, this problem was often compounded when these pious men and women of letters sequestered themselves with spiritual texts in hand.

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3

The Spiritual Quest: Reading and Writing about God and Salvation

I

n 1515, when gasparo contarini failed in his bid to become an attorney for the Venetian government, he knew just where to go. He retreated to his villa and picked up a book, claiming that “it is better to converse in the study with Plato, with the Bible, or with similar authors, than to study the cases of thieves.”1 Readers might readily agree. Given the choice between unfettered hours of reading or the rough and tumble world of criminal courts, many of us (at least in theory) would prefer to spend our time alone with books. A corresponding celebration of what writers do is expressed in the following poem by Contarini’s friend Vittoria Colonna: When the warm and living ray of the Divine Sun that nourishes my heart flashes more than its usual brilliance, so I move my pen, impelled by inner love; and without being fully aware myself of what I am saying, I write his praises.2

Here is the writer’s craft at its most appealing: Colonna wrote because she was inspired, and writing gave full expression to her love. This palpable sense of satisfaction about reading and writing may be timeless; certainly it was widespread in Contarini and Colonna’s day. When their good friend Reginald Pole created daily routines with hours set aside for reading, he fulfilled an ideal embraced by many contemporaries. Similarly (to trace this network around to the subject of our opening chapter), Thomas More echoed a familiar claim when he suggested that his studies restored him to himself. When Erasmus insisted that books make life worth living (and eternal life possible), he gave ardent expression to an attitude common among the learned elite. The iteration of these examples suggests that Colonna and Contarini – the pious poet and the learned gentleman scholar – offer us 86

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a conventional diptych of textual piety: Colonna maintained that her writing was a spiritual practice, guided by illumination from the “Divine Sun”; Contarini believed that as a devoted reader he lived a religious life, like a “friar without the hood.”3 And yet I turn to Contarini and Colonna now because they were disturbed as often as they were enlightened by the words they read and the texts they wrote. Reading and writing (as the very intensity of their claims might remind us) can be hard work; words express and beget despair as well as hope. Borrowing from Ricoeur we also can say that all interactions with texts are symbolically mediated – mediated, in other words, by communal assumptions codified in genres, values, and modes of interpretation.4 In sixteenth-century Europe specifically, each of the exegetical methods available to readers and writers were created by particular communities: monks, grammarians, schoolmen, and humanists.5 Thus when Contarini reported that with his books he lived like a “friar without the hood” he conjured up not only the image of the coarsely woven robe of a sixteenth-century mendicant, but also a traditional way of life with established practices of reading and writing. The Benedictine rule (the influential foundation for cenobitic monasticism in Western Europe) directed monks to devote at least two hours each day to sacred reading. The mendicant orders of Dominicans and Franciscans, who took up the work of preaching and combating heresy, combined this tradition of meditative reading with their university studies of theology and rhetoric. If Contarini found it easy to invoke these traditions, though, he did not find it so easy to live this way of life. Books made him anxious. The reading that was supposed to be nurturing often induced melancholy. The image he summoned to liken himself to a mendicant also symbolized his distance from a formally defined religious life. He was a friar without the hood, and a pious scholar who had to create his own model of religious reading. In a different context – as a woman, as a wife and then a widow, and as a famous Petrarchan poet – Colonna faced a similar problem. She authorized her voice by writing in an established genre of poetry developed by Italian humanists, but she also departed from generic norms by writing overtly about Scripture and Christ. If thereby she set the stage for the “subsequent outpouring of ‘spiritual’ verses in the later sixteenth century” (and, by extension, the famous seventeenthcentury genre of devotional poetry), she herself was not able simply to work within an existing style or mode of writing when she used poetry to express her longing for the divine.6 It was a commonplace from antiquity that reading and writing offered a reprieve from the business of the world, and Colonna and Contarini lived at a time when this belief was given space in the form of domestic studies.7 For

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the scholar, a library or study was a (selectively) public place of knowledge; for the well-heeled businessman it was the Renaissance equivalent of a corporate retreat, a place one went to prepare for public life.8 But for spiritual seekers (including the relatively few privileged women who had studies of their own9 ) it had also the appeal of a utopia, a separate space devoted to reading, writing, and thinking about God.10 This is best illustrated by pictures of St. Jerome. Traditionally portrayed as a doctor of the church, in the fifteenth century Jerome began to appear widely in two new guises – as a penitent in the desert and as a scholar bent over his books in a comfortable study.11 The two iconographies were intertwined; a portrait attributed to Coreggio of a cardinal as Jerome in his study, with a penitent Jerome visible through his window, conveyed clearly that the communion with books could be ascetic and even holy.12 When we speak of pious literati like Erasmus, More, Pole, Colonna, and Contarini seeking an alternative to all that was corrupt or troubling in their worlds, then, we need to look at them alone with a book and a pen, because this was their ideal and the obvious place to locate their quest for transcendence. Thus in this chapter I telescope in from the vast systems of patronage and professional identity explored in Chapter 2 to look closely at textual encounters. A detailed investigation of two of our characters enables us to see how their site of solace became a source of problems. Influenced by widespread and pervasive assumptions about the affective and spiritual power of texts, Contarini and Colonna sought an internal transformation of the heart.13 But in doing so they came up against many unanswered questions: What was the relationship between inner and outer reading? How does an author express the divine instead of the mundane? These questions were closely related to the debates about faith, works, and grace intensified by the rise of Protestantism; they were troubling and unavoidable even before the schism, however, and are part of the reason why Catholic literati made friendship and spiritual exemplars central to their vision of religious life.

gasparo contarini’s reading plan In 1509 the studium at Padua closed, and Gasparo Contarini, then twenty-six, left without a degree after eight years of study. War between Venice and the League of Cambrai (which allied France, Spain, the Empire, and the Pope) meant that studies in Padua, a Venetian protectorate, were disrupted for nearly a decade – and the Venetian sense of security and dominance arguably for much longer. Venice was partially shielded from the general trauma caused by the French invasions of Italy in 1494, but the damage inflicted by the conflicts between 1509 and 1517, along with the Portuguese circumnavigation of the

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Cape of Good Hope (which threatened Venetian monopoly over the spice trade) unavoidably raised the spectre of economic and political decline.14 Contarini had more immediate concerns, however. He returned from Padua with a study plan mapped out for himself (or so he later reported). Although he was the eldest brother and thus the head of his large family since his father’s death in 1502, it seems his brothers mostly took care of his economic and social responsibilities. (As a patrician, he also had obligations to Venice, but it was common for people to wait until their forties to take on public office.) At any rate, there are only a few invocations of family, business, or politics in Contarini’s letters during these years, and (though we know of at least one case where he was personally involved in the conflict) he only mentions the war insofar as it impeded travel or the delivery of letters.15 Instead, he was a man with a mission – to finish the philosophical studies he had begun in Padua, and then to turn “to Christian doctrine and in that quiet pass my years in fear of God.”16 The plan did not work out as he had hoped. What we know about Contarini’s studies between 1509 and 1515 comes from a series of letters he wrote to two friends, Tomasso Giustiniani and Vincenzo Querini. These friends, who were among his closest companions at Padua and Venice, left Contarini behind when they decided to join the hermitage at Camaldoli, in the Appenine mountains of Tuscany.17 Contarini did not want to join them or to belong to a religious order, but like them he wanted to live a life devoted to God. What he and his friends shared was the assumption that you are what you read.18 Giustiniani – who with Querini coauthored a tract for the Fifth Lateran Council that critiqued the influence of pagan scholarship on Christianity19 – put this in stark terms by contrasting his hermetic devotion to God to his previous interest in reading philosophical texts. Rejecting the sophism, scholasticism, and pagan literature he thought dominated intellectual culture in Padua, Giustiniani wrote to Contarini and two other friends that their studies kept them immersed in a life that could not lead to God. He described his friends in Venice and Padua as learned, cultivated men who lived among friends and pursued worldly ambitions; he wanted Contarini and the others to understand that the glory of scholarship that so appealed to them blotted out knowledge of the divine.20 This same assumption about the formative power of texts motivated Giustiniani’s exaggerated claims about the stark contrast between pagan and Christian literature. Giustiniani presented the choice between being an aristocrat in Venice or a hermit in Camaldoli as the choice between being a philosopher and an ascetic: “Such a life was more that of a gentile philosopher than of a religious Christian spirit, and in this life there was no worldly abnegation,

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no mortification of the will, no virtue of obedience, no true poverty, and innumerable dangers to chastity.”21 So too when Contarini’s friend Trifone Gabriele asked the pope to release him from his vow to join a religious order, he asked also that he be released from his promise not to read pagan authors. As the Venetian patrician Gregorio Correr explained to Cecilia Gonzaga in 1443, “How can I believe that you have renounced the world if you love the things that are of the world? . . . So you must put aside your beloved Virgil. . . . Take up instead the Psalter [and] instead of Cicero, the Gospel.” Today we’re accustomed to note that this sort of logic was used to foreclose women’s access to intellectual life. As adults, women were often able to study only if they joined convents, where they were expected to concentrate exclusively on religious works.22 But as the examples from Gabriel and Giustiniani suggest, this restriction was not necessarily gendered because it could apply to men as well as women and was based on a shared assumption that a way of life and a course of study were the same thing. Contarini had been educated by humanist teachers as well as university philosophers, but his reading plan was influenced less by specific intellectual movements than by this more inchoate assumption that reading choices signify spiritual progress.23 In this he was influenced by Renaissance pedagogy, which assumed that students should progress from the simpler to the more complicated, from the building blocks of grammar and rhetoric to the timeless truths transmitted by poetry and moral philosophy.24 As we saw in the discussion in Chapter 2 of Sadoleto’s pedagogical treatise, teachers who believed that this system was a good preparation for Christian studies invoked a tradition promoted by Augustine, and argued that students who were trained in these subjects were ready to imbibe the divine knowledge contained in Scripture.25 Thus when Contarini tried to use his studies to create an alternative way of life for himself, he found it was not easy to do. He tried to read Scripture. And then tried again. Over the course of the next two years, Contarini reports his attempts to leave “human studies” behind as a series of false starts, dashed hopes, and inconclusive decisions – in the process exposing himself as exasperatingly (even comically) indecisive, but also as deeply, painfully, troubled. “But, to tell you the truth about myself . . . I am accomplished in rhetoric and writing, but I don’t know at all how to act. Every day I say to myself: sometime I will do it, but I am never able to motivate myself.”26 What he wanted to do was to read the right kind of books: “My life and my being from now on is in these studies.” Because the decision about how to live was equivalent to the choice about what to study, he was compelled “to free myself from these human studies in order to make it possible for me to transfer to those to which I have always intended to turn.”27 Several months

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later, while questioning Querini’s decision to abandon his family and friends for the life of a hermit, Contarini corollated his scholarly plan to Querini’s choice. He explained that he had finished Ptolemy’s Almagest (the work that gives mathematical formulas for the movement of the sun, the moon, and the planets, and that was superseded by Copernicus’s heliocentric theory later in the sixteenth century) and insisted that he was ready to leave these sorts of text behind: “I have learned what I proposed a long time ago to learn in these human studies. The time has come when I am able to give myself completely to Sacred Scripture.”28 As we will see, he never studied Scripture exclusively, and even this clear statement of intent is mitigated by the caveat that he will continue to “review” other sorts of texts because he needs to in order to direct his nephews’ education.29 Nevertheless, Contarini had high hopes that Scripture would work because (he thought) it would appeal to his emotions rather than his intellect. He started to read proverbs and the books of Solomon (because they are “very moral”), and so believed he was embarked on a new kind of learning. “Through pleasure, seeking to alleviate in every way my usual anxiety in study, I am able to go inside to see, not in order to learn and to know, as a principal end, but to change my life and to kindle my most frigid heart.”30 Although years earlier his brother-in-law had concluded that Contarini – then a student at Padua – was melancholy because he studied too much,31 this is the first time that Contarini himself talked about how his studies upset him. But it would not be the last. Over six months later he was still rehearsing his choices, reviewing his initial plan to turn from philosophy to Christian texts and confessing that his scholarship had unfolded in unexpected ways: After he had finished the study of philosophy “another one occurred to me, I don’t know how” – the study of mathematics and Aquinas’s theology. Contarini never explains why mathematics appealed to him, but given his later descriptions of finding comfort in nonmystical works of scholastic theology, he seems to be offering a version of the conviction Robert Boyle articulated a century later when he maintained that the best way to “fix his volatile fance” was to concentrate on “laborious operations of algebra.”32 Logical exercises were a reassuring alternative to mysterious, albeit transcendent, kinds of insight. In any case, uncertain about how he had come upon these topics and lacking a fixed institutional curriculum, Contarini could not decide whether to study them together or in succession.33 The experience raised distressing questions about whether he could get what he needed from his books, and left him afflicted by “that melancholy disposition that, as you know already, I suffer from greatly.”34 As he wearily explained, the whole project had come to a standstill: “I have come

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to hate studies, and the only thing that once cheered me, that is the reading of Sacred Scripture, now gives me great trouble and discomfort.”35 But Contarini could not shake himself free. Although he observed that his afflictions might be God’s way of trying to overturn his “crazy” belief “that my studies and my way of life ought to be enough to find peace and rest,” his spiritual struggle remained anchored in the question of what to study – and why. He thought this reality regrettable (“And I live this sort of humble and base life, not to be compared not just with yours but even with that of the majority of laymen, giving myself to human studies”) but unavoidable: “From these [human studies] I am taking whatever amusement I can, knowing and seeing that my weak stomach is not sufficient to digest that solid food of sacred letters.”36 Acknowledging that Scripture had not been the sure and steady flame he needed, he concluded that this was because he could not do it alone; he needed God’s help: “This first and highest truth [God] understands well and knows how many times I applied myself to this task [of studying Scripture], and how many times I have prayed from the heart that he would give me grace so my intellect would be nourished in this peaceful garden.” Believing that God is known through love (“If we would approach Him just a little with the affections, he would not need much other satisfaction because he is satisfied by the innermost depths of love through our love”),37 he evaluated his reading by the effect it had on his emotions. The success of Scriptural reading was dependent on its ability to change how the reader felt, but without divine aid Contarini found that its emotional impact was all to the bad: “But always, always, as I apply myself to this task, it has caused a great indisposition in the body, a melancholy humor and great spiritual trouble (perturbation grande ne l’animo).”38 Instead of helping him transcend his natural limits by training his intellect to focus on God, reading the Bible disturbed him in elemental ways – physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Contarini consequently began to feel that Scripture could not easily enhance his ongoing quest for knowledge, nor “nourish” his intellect; instead, he found it uniquely disturbing. Reading scriptural and patristic authors exposed him to a danger he did not face with his philosophical and classical studies. A stint of reading the Gospel of Matthew and works by Augustine and Gregory the Great left him queasy: “Above the indisposition of the body, this reading seems to engender fear in my spirit, vain and mad perhaps; yet, although I might know they are groundless they give me great anxiety.”39 These works of “older theologians” and their “mystical interpretations” forced upon him the conclusion that he was too weak to apprehend what they convey. His limits are not intellectual so much as they are emotional: “Whenever I turn to

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these things, I return from fear to discontent and from discontent to fear.”40 This affective failure is commensurate with its ambition. Believing that reading could engender love, Contarini found instead that it produced a fierce despair. So he sought out lower, more “human” works, and tried to reconcile himself to his natural capacities: “I ought to be content with that study of morality . . . with these base speculations that philosophers and theologians teach – with saint Thomas, in other words. And this way and this weak light is fitting to my spirit.” This weak light is the “natural light” of the intellect that Contarini, like Aquinas, viewed as a “great gift of God” available to pagans and Christians alike. Consequently he did not disparage the intellect, but the trouble that reading caused him made him rethink the link between intellectual work and knowledge of God. “Therefore . . . deprived of an interior inclination, that which I believed would be from above, I have decided to reverence and venerate those things most high. But my study puts it in more elementary things, because the light of them does not support my weak vision.”41 The studies that he thought would be a vehicle of grace instead seemed like the walls that kept him contained within his limited human nature. It is telling that this experience did not make Contarini think that he should change the way he read – that he ought to try, for example, to meditate more thoughtfully on the words and the text, or to stimulate his memory with images as monks and mendicants did. Medieval monks had emphasized the process of reading and the need to savor and digest each word like a morsel of food. In Anselm’s memorable terms, this meant that monks should “taste by reading, chew by understanding, swallow by loving and rejoicing.”42 Yet Contarini lived at a time when books – including numerous devotional books for lay people – were smaller and more legible, and attention focused less on reading techniques than on the reader’s emotional response.43 Because lay devotional reading was done in private (that is, familial) settings, the focus on the emotions was not offset by the ritualized, repetitive encounter with words that was part of daily life in a monastery. The admonishing tone of a preface to a 1492 vernacular translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies is typical: The editor sternly directed his reader – whom he clearly assumed would be lay – to “remove yourself from all business, even legitimate concerns, and in purity and devotion think only of God,” but otherwise gave no directions in how to read.44 Similarly, the author of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, an early fifteenth-century translation of a work then attributed to Bonaventure, similarly explains that the “fruit” of the work will be consumed by the reader who “with all your thought and all your attention, in that manner make present to your soul those things here written that our Lord Jesus said or did . . . as though you were hearing him with your ears or seeing him with your eyes.”45

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In this cultural context, reading – even serious, programmatic reading – often had less to do with intellectual truth claims than with therapeutic effects.46 Instead of changing the way he read, then, Contarini decided that he should find books suitable to his disposition. As a university-trained lay person, this meant that he decided to focus on the study of morality and the speculations of philosophers and theologians like Aquinas: “This way and this weak light is fitting to my spirit.”47 His frustration notwithstanding, he continued to assume what Laurel Amtower identifies as a “reflexive relationship between reading and identity” by prioritizing his studies and describing himself as one who lived “with our friends in studies.”48 Nearly three years after he first declared that he was on the brink of giving Scripture all his attention, he achieved a kind of equilibrium by reading Augustine’s Trinity, which gave him “great spiritual joy,” and Plato’s Republic, which he found quite “useful.”49 Gigliola Fragnito argues that Contarini’s problem was his idea that he had to study Christian texts exclusively, and this pairing of a pagan and a Christian author is his answer. The difference in the way he describes his experience of reading them, though – spiritual transformation on the one hand, utility on the other – underscores that his focus throughout has been less on the distinction between pagan and Christian texts than on how texts affect their readers – and thus, by extension, on the relationship between intellectual knowledge and emotion.50 Thus after years of an intense correspondence with friends who repudiated classical studies along with secular life, Contarini reaffirmed that his studies were the “most exalted aspect of my life.”51 Through all of his spiritual trials he kept his eyes fixed on the written word, knowing that spiritual renewal could not be achieved by studying mathematics, moral philosophy, or philosophical theology, but finding that it was not easily achieved by reading the Bible or other works of spiritual literature, either. Contarini then merged devotional reading and scholarly reading together into a model shorn of the traditional emphasis on mnemonic and meditative techniques, and laden instead with many unanswered questions about how texts affect readers, kindle the heart, and reveal God.

contarini never again wrote with such pain and urgency about his personal life – at least not in the letters that survive to us. Although he failed in his 1515 bid to become a state’s attorney, by 1520 he had been elected to a major office as ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Over the next two decades he held many important posts, including membership in the governing council in Venice, before becoming a cardinal in 1535. Because he actively sought public office and seemed to like the work, Elisabeth Gleason

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concludes that he resolved the quandaries evident in his letters to Giustiniani and Querini by embracing his role as a Venetian patrician.52 Contarini himself – as Gleason notes – compared the life of a diplomat favorably to that of a scholar: “Such a life is most beautiful and honorable, most similar to a life of studies; or rather, it is more important.”53 Although his statement can be used to support the argument that Contarini made peace with his studies by embracing public affairs, it also equivocates in a way that invites another interpretation. Because it affirms that scholarly life sets the standard by which other lives should be judged, we might well read its claim that public life is superior as a dutiful afterthought. Contarini continued to write (and presumably read) scholarly work, but only one early treatise (his reply to On the Immortality of the Soul by Pomponazzi) was published during his lifetime. His many philosophical works dealt abstractly with the same issues that concerned him in the years before he took public office: the relationship between love and knowledge, affect and intellect, grace and human effort.54 Consider, for example, two more vernacular letters Contarini wrote in the 1530s in response to a friend’s request that he explain the relationship between the intellect and the will. Although these letters were really treatises, filled with definitions and references to thinkers like Aristotle and Augustine, their philosophical arguments are convoluted and unoriginal. What animates them is not a systematic philosopher’s concern with precision and clarity, but a spiritual seeker’s desire to figure out how the work of the mind corresponds to the life of the spirit. The first letter begins with an awkward opening question that reveals Contarini still trying to understand the relationship between affect and intellect: “How is it,” he asks, “that one reaches God, who is both true and good, more quickly with the will than with the intellect even though as Truth He is the object of the intellect just as He is, as Goodness, the object of the will?”55 The anxiety we saw in his letters to Giustiniani and Querini (written twenty years earlier) about the need to kindle the heart in order to find God finds here its philosophical counterpart in the claim that God is reached more quickly with the will. Yet this initial question also expresses his enduring conviction that it was through his studies that he would find comfort and inspiration, because God is Truth and thus the object of an intellectual search. In this dry treatise we can discern the same uncertainty that animated his earlier, tortured quest, and feel something of the same unsatisfied need for a resolution. The treatise opens by reviewing two possible answers to the initial question, proposes a third, and just as quickly leaves that behind in order to revisit the opening question. Although some people think that true happiness comes from knowing God (the perfection of the intellect), and others think it comes from loving God (the perfection of the will), Contarini initially points beyond

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this dichotomy: “I do not want to discuss which of these opinions is correct. I want rather to reach a third which in my opinion is truer than either of the other two – an opinion I have taken from Dionysius in his book about the divine names.”56 Citing Scripture to support his reading of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a ninth-century philosopher, he concludes that true happiness consists in a union that “transcends all action – the action of the intellect and the action of the will, so that one is absorbed in rest, in truth, and in divine being.”57 So it seems that Contarini has overcome his earlier aversion to mystical texts and that the very sort of ideas that once disturbed him most now provide him with a way to transcend the opposition between knowing and feeling, between the will and the intellect, and between scholarship and love of God. The treatise does not end here, though. Instead of using the point about mystical ineffability (that one reaches God only by passing beyond both the will and the intellect) to conclude the treatise, Contarini changes the terms of the initial question. Suggesting that pseudo-Dionysius and texts from Paul demonstrate that there is no answer to the original query about why the will is an easier path to God, Contarini asserts that the real question is about the relationship between goodness and knowledge. Thus he observes that a good, unlearned man is better than a learned man who is not good, even as he affirms that true understanding of God is achieved through the intellect. He balances the two assertions by invoking love: “If happiness consists in the perfect operation of the intellect, we come to it more perfectly through the way of love than through the way of knowledge.”58 This is not the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from pseudo-Dionysius (though some of Contarini’s contemporaries also equated pseudo-Dionysius’s telos with love rather than with an apophatic stripping away of emotion and intellect alike).59 Contarini, however, makes this move because he is interested in what hinders the intellect’s access to God. Consequently, the figure of an unlearned man does not demonstrate that people need to cast learning aside; instead Contarini invokes this figure to cast into relief the lamentable state of the learned man who is blocked from true cognition because his intellect is clouded by his faults. Contarini has little to say about what can be known through goodness or love alone – the kind of knowledge available to an uneducated person. He is fascinated instead – as he was twenty years earlier – by the problem of how intellectual work can impede or aid the quest for God. In the second treatise Contarini suggests that perhaps the intellect is a problem because it is superior. In an absolute sense, the intellect is higher than the will because it is directed toward the divine; yet the will is better precisely because it is less exalted – because it is well-suited to human capacities.

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Contarini here wades into the ongoing debate about whether it is better to live a contemplative or active life, and by the time he thrashes back to shore, the waters are murkier than ever. On the one hand he says that the intellect is the guide, and he observes that moral virtue is “good and perfect insofar as it follows the dictate of right reason.”60 There is a simple hierarchy – the intellect is directed toward God and it is served by a properly directed will: “Moral virtues are ordered to restrain the disordered movements of the appetites of the senses, in order that they not disturb reason or the intellect so that this can do its work – which is to contemplate and speculate.”61 In this sense the contemplative life is clearly superior. On the other hand, the will prevails in real life. It is the “patron of all operations” and has the final say not only over our actions but also over our thoughts: “We can choose not to walk if we do not want to. We can choose not to eat. We can refrain from speculating and contemplating if we want to.”62 This assertion supports the idea that the active life is not only more suited to human nature but a more essential part of it. By shifting between claims about the natural priority of the will and the abstract superiority of the intellect, Contarini dramatizes the tension between action and contemplation, and then heightens the effect with a parable. The parable is about the relationship between a captain and his first mate who directed a failed armada during the Peloponnesian War. Contarini approvingly introduces the captain as the rightful commander of the fleet, but describes the first mate as the individual responsible for the ship’s actual movements. In the example Contarini lays forth, the captain’s wise guidance was sabotaged by the first mate’s actions. Contarini thereby presents the will as a destructive force but also as the locus of all activity – of all that is meaningful and important in human life. When he describes the captain as the intellect, for instance, Contarini notes that the captain’s goal is an abstract ideal, beyond the active administration of the family and the republic, just as the intellect’s goal of contemplative happiness is above human nature.63 Thus the intellect is simultaneously necessary – to direct the will – and irrelevant – because it is directed to a realm beyond the pressing need of everyday life. Retracting an earlier claim, Contarini subsequently concludes that knowledge is not a virtue because the operation of the intellect is not in itself “perfection in doing the good.” Contarini’s vacillation between affirming and devaluing the intellect is not easy to follow; the twists and turns are crucial, though, because taken together the two letter treatises express Contarini’s uncertainty about how to affirm the importance of scholarly reading and writing in light of his conviction – reinforced by experience – that the will, morality, and love are most important. In the first treatise he abruptly concluded that intellectual work could be

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valuable in the pursuit of God only insofar as it was transformed through love to become a kind of affective cognition. In the second work he concentrated on the differences between the realm of the will and the realm of the intellect in several ways: through the ship metaphor; through the claim that knowledge is not virtue; and through the conclusion about the superiority of the active life. He did not, however, draw these arguments together into a conclusion that would decisively demote the intellect, because (as he confided to the recipient of the letters in 1532) he loved to think about rational arguments and immerse himself in philosophical texts, and was sad when public duties made it hard for him to do so.64 His major philosophical work, for example, was composed while he was in the midst of “very serious public business” as an ambassador to Spain, and he explained in the dedication of September 1527 that writing it relieved him of cares and worries and invigorated his spirit.65 In the 1520s and 30s he also wrote a long treatise about the republican government of Venice (which was quickly translated into several languages after its publication in 1543 and is arguably his most famous work), as well as other works about preaching, conciliarism, church reform, physical science, and Catholic responses to Lutheran doctrines. In an important sense, studies remained what they were for him in 1514 – the “most exalted aspect of my life.”66 Yet the uncertainty that troubled him then frustrated him still. As he said during his first year as a cardinal in 1535, when he lived “with friends, and when time allows, with some Christian books,” he remained convinced that books were the locus of a life devoted to God even as they continued to fail him: “I am trying to acquire some knowledge of Christian doctrine and Christian life, yet the more I read about this life the further removed from it I seem to be, and I live almost as if asleep and frozen still. Nor have I found a way to wake and rouse myself, unless it be through the hope that I have in divine goodness, which prepares the way to strengthen, awaken, and inflame a man when he is well aware of the weakness and infirmity that he cannot overcome or heal by his own efforts.”67 Clearly it is still Christian books in particular, and the question of how to live a Christian life, that disturb him. Contarini’s conviction about the need for grace was informed by the trouble he had with reading, and his philosophical discussions about the intellect and the will were responses to the same problem.

vittoria colonna and writing to god In the winter of 1536 Contarini wrote another letter treatise, this time to Vittoria Colonna, apparently in response to questions she asked him about free will.68 Colonna and Contarini had many of the same interests, not all of

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them abstractly theological. They traveled in the same circles in Rome, where they both lived (Contarini since his appointment as cardinal earlier in the year and Colonna since 1525 when, after her husband’s death, she made a Roman convent her primary residence). As an aristocratic widow from a powerful family that was often militarily and politically opposed to the papacy, and as a self-appointed patron of reform movements within the church – notably the reformed Franciscan order known as Capuchins – Colonna was embroiled in much the same ecclesial and secular politics that consumed Contarini and their mutual friend Reginald Pole. Contarini was one of the authorities Colonna appealed to as she sought to help the new order of Capuchins win papal approval; when Contarini wrote up a compromise doctrine of justification to heal the breech between Protestants and Catholics in 1541, their mutual friend Pietro Bembo sent Colonna a copy.69 Along with their interest in institutional religious reform, these two shared an uncertainty about how to achieve it. (Contarini was part of the committee of cardinals that produced the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia detailing the need for institutional reform, and when Colonna asked Pole and Contarini about what was being done to put the reforms into action they “shrugged their shoulders, meaning to answer her – she has a quick mind – by their silence rather than by telling her openly the reason.”)70 But personally they both sought to reform and regenerate themselves through their reading and writing. As Contarini’s letter to Colonna about free will suggests, Colonna may well have been interested in the same philosophical and theological approaches that interested Contarini – certainly her friends assumed that she was welleducated enough to follow these sorts of abstract argument. When Colonna herself wrote about how humans might seek God, though, she did so as a poet. In his letter to her, Contarini argued that the will must be purified by education (according to the philosophers) or faith (according to Christians) if it is to direct the intellect to the divine end for which it was created. In one of her poems, Colonna expressed much the same point about how the volition must be redirected for the pilgrim to find God: Restricted to an obscure, horrible, lonely place, hidden, enclosed by my own suffering, all the senses bound to the good thought, today all the good I hope for in the world is that with a lofty flight I might quickly unite the mind to my highest desire.71

Seeking to escape emotional and physical pain, Colonna here concentrates her entire being in her thoughts. If her senses, which signify her mortal life,

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are made subservient to her mind, she believes she can unite with her “highest desire” (literally her husband and, allegorically, God). The path she envisions does not require incremental steps of contemplation, but bursts and leaps – a lofty flight, a quick unification. Just as Contarini believed that what he read directly influenced his ability to be at peace with God, so too Colonna imagined that poetry could facilitate her “lofty flight.” Like Contarini, Colonna sought this apart from the framework provided by the ritualized devotional practices of traditional religious orders, and thus poetry became both the source and context for her questions about key issues debated between Protestants and Catholics: human effort and divine power, faith and works, Spirit and text.

colonna’s perspective was shaped by her standing as the foremost female Petrarchan poet of her day. Born in 1492 and married in 1507, Colonna spent the years of her marriage at her husband’s court in Ischia and in nearby Naples. Like her father and brothers, her husband spent most of his life fighting military battles, and he was wounded and died in 1525. Colonna had no children, but she directed her nephew’s education; a contemporary biographer reported that she insisted she was not sterile, because her nephew had thus been given life by her intellect (nato dal mio intelletto).72 She spent much of her time with the writers and literati who were drawn to the Neapolitan court. We do not know much about Colonna’s education, but Machiavelli presented her father as an articulate military strategist in his work on the art of war, and her mother grew up in the sophisticated court at Urbino where Castiglione would set The Courtier, his famous manual for cultured courtly behavior. Castiglione’s work featured Pietro Bembo, who went on to promote Colonna’s poetry.73 Unlike the notable learned women of previous centuries, Colonna did not write works of theology and philosophy or compose in Latin;74 she probably was educated at home by a humanist tutor, as upper-class children (boys, of course, but in many families also girls) often were. Although she did not write in the beautiful hand humanists were known for, she could read at least some Latin as well as Italian, and she had a wealth of classical figures and myths at her fingertips. (In her later poems it was clear that she also knew the Bible, especially the Gospel of John, well).75 We know of only one poem that she wrote before 1525, while her husband was still alive, but an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy was presented to her in 1515 with praise for her eloquence, and a work of poems dedicated to her in 1519 includes a sonnet that lauds her poetic style.76 This appreciation for eloquence went both ways: When Castiglione sent her a copy of The Courtier before it was published, she wrote a letter extolling his beautiful prose, declaring that

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it was so compelling that she did not know whether to attribute its excellence to nature or to art.77 Colonna also knew and seems to have been deeply influenced by Jacopo Sannazzaro (1457–1530), a poet in Naples best known for his pastoral romance, Arcadia. Sannazzaro also wrote Petrarchan poems, and there are signs that Colonna read his poem about Christ’s incarnation (De partu virginis), which was hailed by Erasmus, among others.78 Showing the same confidence in the power of language that she demonstrated in her letter to Castiglione, Colonna lamented in a poem that she and others were “diminished” by Sannazzaro’s death without his “exquisite poetry” to sustain them.79 In the same year Sannazzaro died, Colonna met Bembo.80 Their friendship may have heightened her enthusiasm about writing poetry, and it certainly reinforced her social standing as a poet. Bembo’s position as the arbiter of Italian literary taste was based on several works, including his Italian dialogues about platonic love (Gli Asolani, first published in 1505), and his famous Prose della volgar lingua (1525), in which he argued that Petrarch’s language was normative for the Italian poetic vernacular. Bembo’s own Petrarchan sonnets circulated widely even before they were published in 1530, and the first of Colonna’s poems to appear in print was in the second edition of Bembo’s poems, which was printed in 1535. He anointed Colonna as one of his disciples and praised her poems as skillful, thoughtful, and eloquent – confirming that they had the combination of serious decorum (gravità) and pleasing gracefulness (piacevolezza) required of all good poetry. Colonna had been steeped in Christian neoplatonism and Petrarchan ideas from her time in Naples, long before she met Bembo, and in their earliest exchange of letters, Colonna was already prepared to exchange sonnets and discuss meter and style.81 The edition of her poems that appeared in 1538 was the first by a woman to be published. As Dionisotti long ago argued, the publication of her work set the stage for numerous other vernacular women writers in Italy. Various collections of the nearly four hundred poems she wrote were reprinted and issued in new editions many times during her lifetime and since.82 The most noticeable thing about Colonna’s poems is that the bulk of them are divided into two categories: amorous poems (rime amorose), and spiritual poems (rime spirituali). From 1539 up through the modern critical edition, editors have imposed this division with the claim that her love poems are earlier works about her husband, whereas her spiritual poems come later and reflect her deepening religious convictions and her new focus on Christ and God.83 Without this editorial intervention, however, it is often difficult to distinguish between the two, because like Petrarch and Bembo, Colonna envisioned the

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subject of her amorous poems in neoplatonic terms, as the object of a love that pulls her out of the mundane and into the sublime. Thus her husband is from the beginning an allegorical figure and (unlike Petrarch’s Laura) by gender Christ-like. To be sure, the subject and vocabulary of Colonna’s poetry varies; in what seem to be the later poems she relies heavily on scriptural rather than classical images, and in some she offers a vision of mystical union not found in other lyric poetry. Yet the editorial division between her love poems and her spiritual poems makes it harder to see that both sets of poems confront the same quandary: How does poetry create the reality it expresses? Colonna writes of her desire to be transformed, to be lifted from this world into another. She writes repeatedly of her longing for a catalyst – a savior – and about whether her words, her thoughts, her mind, her love, might help her. Her poems, amorous and spiritual alike, thus offer a sustained meditation on the question of poetry – whether it can be a devotional praxis, and if so, how.

poetry was a contested topic in the sixteenth century. 84 old notions that poetry was a form of rhetoric or logic were well entrenched, as was the idea that the main goal of poetry was to inspire virtue by praising great men and their deeds.85 Poetry was a branch of moral philosophy (according to this line of thought) because its language was like a sugar-coating that made moral lessons palatable. Meanwhile, as I discussed in Chapter 2, a small but influential series of writers made more grandiose claims for poetic theology: Dante in the thirteenth, Petrarch and Boccaccio in the fourteenth, and Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth century all claimed in one way or another that poetry was theology. Their claims differed: Dante, for example, made cognitive claims for poetry, whereas Petrarch based his claim on the rhetorical similarity between poetry and Scriptural language. The following ambiguous claims by the fifteenth-century humanist Salutati were indicative of a general lack of clarity about what people meant when they suggested that poetry was a study of God: “In songs of the poets divine mysteries seem to resound either within the mysteries of the allegory or in the very expression of the words.” By choosing the word “resounds,” as Ronald Witt points out, Salutati skirts the issue of causality, and he remains in the nebulous zone between the idea that poetry was sacral (that is, about divine things) or sacred (infused itself with divine energy). This ambiguity did not avert the wrath of those like Savonarola who thought it was presumptuous to equate poetry with theology.86 It also meant that neoplatonically inspired poets (like Colonna) who believed that divine mysteries resounded in poetry had few landmarks

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available as they tried to use poetry for devotion. Colonna navigated this landscape by averring that it was emotion, not style, that sanctioned her poetry: I write only to ease the inner sorrow On which my heart feeds, wishing nothing more – Not to add light to my beloved Sun, To his great spirit and honored spoils. I have good reason to lament; It grieves me that I might diminish his glory; A better pen and far wiser words would be better able to deprive death of his great name.87 Pure faith, ardor, and intense pain may excuse me in front of everyone; for so bitter are my tears that neither time nor reason can curb them. Bitter weeping, not sweet singing, and melancholy sighs, not a clear voice, make me praise not my style but my sorrow.88

Her initial disclaimer mimics Petrarch, who began his Rime sparse by asking the reader to attribute his stylistic transgressions to the excesses of his youth,89 but Colonna’s focus on emotion locates her in the sixteenth century: If it is not the sweetness of the words themselves but somehow the emotion they convey, how is it that the poet, relying on the very words he or she disavows, can achieve the desired effect? Colonna betrays her uncertainty when, in a poem addressed to another poet, she wonders whether she might exchange her ardor for the poet’s skill (ingegno) in order to make her poetry equal to its subject (namely, the divine).90 Emotion alone is not enough – it has to be channeled, transformed, and articulated if it is to enable a spiritual ascent. Thus in another poem she writes of how her sorrow must be restrained.91 The mind, moreover, must be altered, pitched to a different register of love and desire: “But if the mind burning with high desire becomes delirious, forced by amorous zeal, give your strength and daring to my thoughts.”92 This is made possible somehow by poetic words – the words she writes and the act of writing – which imbue her with the courage she does not otherwise have: Neither the heart more constant nor less ardent, neither the sound sweeter nor the less vivid desire could ever give me such courage that I would lift the mind to such a dubious hope.93

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The next stanza of this poem equivocally reclaims the hope it disavowed with a conditional affirmation of faith in poetry: But if it is useful to hope in weak art, Phaeton’s daring and Icharus’ wings would be instruments worthy of my suffering to lead me near to where my brilliant light lives so he may teach me how swiftly to fly to him.94

However conditionally (“if it is useful to hope in weak art”), human work is nevertheless affirmed because it offers the possibility of hope after the bleakness of the first two stanzas. Colonna’s reference to poetry as a weak art stands in stark contrast to the description in Boccaccio’s defense of poetry, where he argued it was a human art (facultas) spawned by God – exquisitely wrought and concerned with lofty, noble things and therefore not to be confused with technical, limited skills like the facultas of law, practiced for material gain.95 But Colonna, writing in Italian and concerned with the spiritual efficacy of her poetry rather than with professional identity, leaves aside the question of how to differentiate poetry from other kinds of writing in order to focus on how it is that poetry is concerned with lofty things. She thus reinforces the identification between poetry and art by invoking classical figures. The poet is emboldened by a muse, and writes with quills metaphorically equated with Icharus, a famous figure from classical mythology. Celebrating the instruments or tools provided by this classical tradition, though, brought out the paradox that preoccupied Colonna: Poetry seemed to offer the tools she needed even as it exposed how weak they were. In Colonna’s experience, then, the question of poetry was a version of the concern about works and faith that mesmerized sixteenth-century Christians. Like many of her contemporaries, she emphasized that the answer was to be found in Christ. The poem conventionally identified as the first of her spiritual poems seems to affirm this straightforwardly: Since my chaste love for a long time made my soul desirous of fame – a desire nourished like a serpent in the breast – now, through sorrow and pain my soul is turned to God, from whom the remedy has come. Let the holy nails now be my quills (and wings) the precious blood pure ink, and the sacred, bloodless body my paper so that I may inscribe within what he endured. It is not fitting here to invoke Parnassus nor Delos,

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to a different spring we aspire, a different mountain we climb where human feet by themselves do not ascend; I pray to that Sun who illumines the elements and the heaven that by opening his clear fountain he may offer me drink equal to my great thirst.96

In this poem she imagines forsaking poetry for Christ. Sorrow replaced a poet’s quest for worldly glory and made her see that God alone could answer her needs. As she said elsewhere, poems are like human works: useless without grace. “Our will is blind, our works vain, / the mortal feathers (piume) fall to the first wind / without the firm support of Jesus.”97 By insisting that she and her readers had different goals than the pilgrims in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Colonna seemed to differentiate herself from the humanist poets who believed that poetic language – pagan and Christian alike – expressed divine truths. By acknowledging that she does not have the capacity to climb as high as she wants to go, Colonna also alludes to the closely related idea that Christians are saved through faith in Christ rather than by their own works. Thus Colonna the author imagines God taking over her work by giving her Christ. She will write with the nails of the cross. Her ink will be Christ’s blood. His body will be the paper. But in the final stanza Colonna returns to the language of illumination familiar to neoplatonically inspired poets, and ends with an image of active yearning that refocuses attention on the speaker rather than the source of inspiration. The parched speaker longing for water (“equal to my thirst”) recalls the writer’s self-description two stanzas earlier as one who sought to write with Christ’s body. The pairing reminds us that she envisions herself still as active: hoping to inscribe “for myself” what Christ suffered. We can fully appreciate the significance of this line by contrasting it with an alternative version in the manuscript collection Colonna prepared and gave as a gift to her friend Michelangelo. In that version, instead of writing that she might inscribe “for myself” (per me), she longs to describe Christ’s suffering “to another” (ad altrui).98 Christ provides the material, God the inspiration, but the writer still has to compose the work. She does so in the hope that the writing itself will change its reader – whether that be the author (who having written within might read herself differently) or another reader (who might be transformed by her words about Christ’s broken body). This crucified Christ was a focal point of devotional life throughout the late Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, but Colonna’s attention to it often sparks questions about who shaped her religious views. The “scuola religiosa”

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(as Ranieri calls it) in Naples that influenced Colonna during her twenties and thirties included Sannazzaro – whose image (in Lamentatio Christi) of Christ opening his arms on the cross appeared later in Colonna’s poem99 – and also Egidio of Viterbo (1469–1532), who inspired Sannazzaro’s poem about Christ. Egidio, who became friar general of the Augustinian Order, developed a mystical neoplatonism that emphasized prayerful reading of Scriptural books – the psalms in particular – but he also sought union with God by meditating on the crucified Christ.100 Later in her life Colonna was further encouraged to dwell on Christ’s suffering by Bernardino Ochino, who with her help had been appointed Vicar General of the Capuchins in 1538.101 Colonna met Ochino in 1527, and by 1538 her letters suggest that she sometimes moved from one town to another to listen to him preach.102 (Ochino’s Lenten and Easter preaching were particularly popular. At one point the pope was involved in fixing his preaching schedule.) Colonna echoes Ochino’s main themes in her poems about gazing on the suffering Christ, and trusting that through faith the sinner will be excused in the eyes of God. It is plausible, for example, that Colonna’s poem about how a “friendly voice” directed the poem’s speaker to look at the man nailed on the cross might have been inspired by Ochino’s meditation on the psalm line, “cor contritus.”103 A similar message also could have been instilled by Egidio’s meditations (though he placed less emphasis on Christ’s pain) or, from an earlier century, Catherine of Siena’s widely influential writings about the importance of being bathed in Christ’s blood and cultivating the inner eye.104 Most often, Colonna’s focus on Christ and illumination is attributed to Juan Valdés, although there is no evidence that the two met; Campi has argued convincingly that Ochino was the source of most of Colonna’s knowledge about Valdés teaching.105 Valdés was a Spaniard who ended up in Naples in 1535 after a couple of years at the papal court in Rome. His influential 1535 work, Christian Alphabet, is presented as a dialogue that Valdés and Duchess Giulia Gonzaga had in Naples after hearing a Lenten homily by Ochino. (Colonna and Gonzaga corresponded, and in 1541, the year Valdés died, Colonna asked Gonzaga for a copy of his work on the Pauline letters, saying no one needed it more than she.)106 Ochino became one of Valdés’s closest followers; they both taught the importance of faith and inner regeneration and advised Christians to nourish their faith by contemplating the Crucifixion.107 Valdés was also influenced by Erasmus. Before coming to Italy, Valdés wrote a Dialogue on Christian Doctrine that included almost all of Erasmus’s colloquy, “An Examination Concerning the Faith.” For Erasmus, who praised Valdés’s work, the point was that Christians who could agree on the teachings in the Apostles’ Creed should not be divided over less essential issues; Valdés enhanced this

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claim by emphasizing that all believers are illuminated by the Spirit of Christ, and thus know through personal experience rather than through dogma or institutional rites. This early work reflects the focus on illumination that is considered characteristic of Valdés – an emphasis that is evident also in Colonna’s works, whether or not she got this idea directly from Valdés.108 Colonna confidently affirms that illumination is bound up with Christ’s salvific death: “Opening wide the arms and the nourishing and pure wounds on the cross,” she writes, “with tears you opened heaven. . . . The human minds until now obscured, you illuminated.” But she is less sure-footed when it comes to describing how Christ imbues us with this illumination. This light, Colonna writes, “appears clear in Christ,” and “through faith” divine mercy “shines for us through his open wounds.” In this same poem, however, she suggests that this faith requires not only a contemplative vision of Christ’s passion, but also knowledge of what Colonna refers to as the “footprint and the example” conveyed through “modern history and ancient,” which shows the pilgrim the “steep path” to God. These references to historical example and the incremental ascent conveyed through the image of a path suggest that Colonna views faith and illumination not only as a singular kind of existential apprehension of the salvific nature of Christ’s death, but views them also as products of a cumulative process that relies on human effort as well as divine action. The coexistence of these two positions suggests that Colonna was exploring the parameters of how to seek God rather than trying to weigh in on the ardent theological debates about justification. Partly for this reason she fails to convey a comprehensive sense of how one comes to be illuminated, and how illumination affects one’s ability to understand and know God. The question of who influenced Colonna and others like her preoccupies scholars now because the stakes were so high at the time. When the Roman Inquisition was reinstituted in 1542 in order to, among other things, eradicate Protestant heresies, both Valdés and Ochino were identified as sources of the infection.109 Valdés escaped censure because he died in 1541, and Ochino fled to Protestant countries where he spent the rest of his life, often as a controversial figure.110 Colonna and Pole were both investigated, along with many of their friends.111 Clearly they were all sympathetic with the notions that faith has primacy over works, and Scriptural reading and prayer could aid spiritual rebirth in the individual Christian. Beyond that it is difficult to label them according to the chart subsequently drawn up to distinguish Protestant from Catholic. As Thomas Mayer observes about the effort to determine whether there was an organized effort to convert Pole to Valdesian views, Pole had developed similar beliefs on his own and, Protestant or not, they were akin to Benedictine spirituality in Italy.112 This was true in Colonna’s case as well.

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Regardless of where she got her emphasis on faith in Christ and the need for spiritual illumination, she grappled with these issues not just as the follower of one or another religious thinker, but as a writer whose most pressing problem was the fact that she wrote of things beyond words: I represent with my thought turned to God the pure light without the shade that forms the contrasts of light and dark, but rather the pure, living splendor of the celestial sun . . . whose beauty living thought could not reflect nor could memory relate it in writing, and least of all could a gifted mind praise it in rhyme.113

This is the mystic’s dilemma – how to express an inexpressible experience – but Colonna is not best understood as a mystic. She does not describe stages of purgation and illumination, nor does she dwell on auditory or visionary contact with the divine. Certain images that she used (“immense and pure abyss of light,” “inaccessible light,” “high darkness”) are new in lyric poetry, and come from mystical texts. One of her contemporary editors likened her vision of light to pseudo-Dionysius’s mystical light – demonstrating what we have seen also with Contarini, that pseudo-Dionysius was a popular author, and that mystical visions and images were frequently discussed.114 Like Contarini and Erasmus, however, Colonna seems to have used texts as the medium for imagining or aspiring toward a mystic’s perspective, rather than being inspired to produce texts because of her mystical experiences. Colonna did not report visions that commissioned her to speak, as many medieval women mystics (and their confessors) had. For instance before Catherine of Siena set off to Avignon to speak with Pope Gregory XI in April 1376, she reported seeing a vision of Christ crucified: “I saw the Christian people and the infidels entering into the side of Christ, and through desire and the affect of love I went into the midst of them; and I entered with them into Christ, sweet Jesus.” Then Christ told her to speak: “And then he [Christ] put the cross on my shoulder and the olive branch in my hand . . . and said that I should carry it to the one people and the other. And he said to me: ‘Tell them, I announce to you a great joy.’” Colonna, by contrast, does not say that Christ or God authorized her to speak (though she claims them as inspiration). Instead she relied on generic authorization, self-deprecating claims of emotion, and expressions of her own longing to apprehend – and to convey – transcendent knowledge.115 In Rime, then, Colonna presents herself as trying to possess the pure light by writing about it – in writing that acknowledges its own inadequacy by revealing that words can neither reflect nor fully express light. Marilyn Migiel

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observes that in the tradition of vernacular Italian poetry starting with Dante, “the poet’s encounter with the beloved [was] the mainstay of metaphysical reflections about the possibility of human knowledge and the possibility of communication within the limits of language.” Colonna, in contrast, shows that for poets in this tradition, meditation on the beloved, conceived allegorically (the divine Sun, the true light), could be about something else besides communication – namely, salvation.116 She can see (she writes) something like a round ball lit from within, but she needs to find a way to access the truth that this vision contains: Now when will it be that my soul will follow into that dwelling place my thought, that stretches itself so far up, that on its return often does not render to my memory what it caught in Heaven?117

Colonna is keenly aware that language is limited. “My thought . . . often does not render to my memory what it caught in Heaven.” How does the heart enter the loved one’s eyes? she asks in another poem, for words seldom convey the breadth and depth of their subject.118 Nevertheless, when she thinks about the purpose of her writing, Colonna imagines it as a transformative, potentially salvific, catalyst that is not achieved by God alone. Recall the stanza quoted at the beginning of this chapter: I move my pen, impelled by inner love; and without being fully aware myself of what I am saying, I write his praises.119

Full self-awareness becomes something else, but it is not negated entirely. God and Christ inspire Colonna’s poetry, but they are not the authors of her work. Colonna likens herself to a scribe who is “not fully conscious” as she takes down the words conveyed to her through divine illumination, but she still uses verbs in the first person: It is she who moves the pen, she who writes the praises, she who inscribes the tale of Christ’s suffering (movo, scrivo, scriva). Thus Colonna suspends herself between passivity and activity, between claiming authorial agency and relying on divine inspiration. As a writer, she does not simply assert that illumination or grace transforms the puniness of human effort into the sufficiency of salvific action; instead she tries to navigate a kind of partnership between the pilgrim poet and the god she seeks. In her search for direct, experiential piety, Colonna affirmed the importance of humility. “Sacred sayings” (as she wrote to her friend Michelangelo, himself an accomplished poet) are known best by one who “studies little and

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believes the more.”120 As her poems and meditations on Christ’s death make clear, though, she believed that images and ideas created by people make this heartfelt knowledge possible. For instance, a poem to Michelangelo about Christ offering up his heart on the cross first acknowledges that it is presumptive to think her words might increase his faith, but then offers the description nevertheless in the hope that her words might heighten her reader’s appreciation of Christ’s gift. Additionally, in a longer prose work about the Pietà, Colonna’s words mirror Michelangelo’s drawings in the way they portray the physical and affective details of the image of the dead Christ in Mary’s lap, and emphasize the important role the human observer (first Mary, then by extension the author and artist) plays in communicating the meaning of this event.121 Colonna dwells on how Mary’s grief animates Christ’s body, how her bitter tears and burning sighs “make him appear truly alive.” She then asserts that those who were present with Christ in his hour of death received an “immense grace.” Few were present even at the time, however, and though the angels (who are present also in the drawing of the Pietà that Michelangelo gave to Colonna) appeared to make up for their absence, it was the Virgin alone who sustains “the faith alive in her holy breast.”122 In what Alexander Nagel describes as a “curious conclusion,” Colonna affirms that after Christ’s soul departed, the Virgin was left with the task of preserving the honor and majesty of Christ before God: Thus the Madonna, seeing the absence of the holy soul of Christ, which alone was sufficient to honor the immense grandeur of divinity, saw that it was up to her to supply such a great debt, and would have wanted to liquefy herself, consume herself to the very limit in the fire of love and in the tears of compassion in order to rid the world and herself of such ingratitude, and to render to God the obsequy and the cult that were due him.123

Colonna’s description of the Virgin’s duty is not surprising if we recognize that the poet saw herself in an analogous position – not as the blessed Virgin, but as a woman attempting to make Christ’s dead body present, using words to describe this love and loss, to render what is owed to God.124 Colonna’s desire to imagine words and images working together, in similar ways, is cast into dramatic relief by another meditative prose work that Colonna wrote to her cousin Costanza d’Avalos Piccolomini, Duchess of Amalfi. In three letters intended to direct her cousin’s meditations, Colonna invites her reader to think above all about the “singular patron and queen,” the Virgin Mary, and the “wonderful mystery of the highest Word she has incarnated in herself.”125 The letter, as Brundin points out, ends with a particularly strong (and nontraditional) affirmation that Mary is a speaker, not the silent figure as in the Bible but one who teaches and spreads the word of God.

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Mary thus stands as a model for Colonna – not just as the Mother of God, an inspiring image, but as a woman who speaks wise words, who thereby does what Colonna aspires to do by writing poems.126

scripture and spiritual discernment For Colonna as for Contarini, Pole, Erasmus, More, and other spiritual seekers among them, Scripture was unquestionably the true Word of God, but they had pressing questions about the relationship between written words and spiritual discernment. Their intuition that texts had both spiritual and social value – that they catalyzed both spiritual growth and community – was loosely but inextricably bound to the search for direct, experiential knowledge of the divine. This is readily apparent in Colonna’s poem about how the written Bible was inferior to the “book of the Cross” because the reader has to follow an indirect path: With that guide [of Scripture], the soul goes to join the desired end passing through long and dubious paths; there are ways to bypass this slow and arduous route: but often with this guide [of the book of the Cross], illustrated by divine light and burning with ardor, the soul runs quickly and certainly to the true sign.127

The sweetness, quickness, and certainty offered by the book of the Cross are clearly preferable to a written guide. In the same poem, however, Colonna maintains that these two are inseparable. She calls them both “books” and presents them as complementary ways to learn about God: “We have two ways to see the grace of heaven – one looking often on the sacred writings where the light is expressed that to a living eye seems so bright; and the other raising the clear eyes of the heart to the book of the Cross, where he shows himself so close to us that the eye cannot fail to see him.”128 Thus she intertwines reading with a more immediate form of knowledge – a connection she reinforces by interweaving her metaphors. She writes of seeing or regarding (guardando) Scripture, the literal text, and describes the Cross – a visual image – as a book to be read. In this way Colonna simultaneously asserts that the contemplation of Christ or an interior apprehension of the Crucifixion is the most direct and certain way to “read” Truth, even as she maintains that one can reach the same knowledge by reading words.129 The book of the Cross was a traditional image, but Colonna was using it in a distinctive way.130 From the twelfth century onward, a notable series of

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religious writers – Cistercians, Franciscans, and Dominicans among them – encouraged people to meditate on Christ’s suffering.131 They presented Christ’s crucifixion as a book in order to wean their readers away from an excessive reliance on actual books. A nun who lived in a convent in which hours were set aside each day to read was assured by a Dominican monk that her time would be better spent “taking and reading the book which is ever in your mind’s eye, the book of life . . . which you will find beautifully written, when you look on Jesus our Savior, stretched out on the Cross as parchment, written in purple, illuminated with his holy blood.”132 Analogous directives from men to men more often emphasized the need to balance reading and prayer, but men and women alike were influenced by the underlying conviction that true knowledge came from mimetic identification with Christ – a conviction that famously inspired St. Francis to pray for God’s help in overcoming his temptation to desire books.133 “In the thirteenth century,” Beryl Smalley concludes, “reading was giving way to devotions.”134 Monastic traditions of devotional reading became a resource for spiritual writers, especially vernacular writers, who were trying to teach people how to “read” Christ. The fourteenth-century English Book to a Mother directed its female reader to . . . learn this book . . . that is, know thou the living of Christ and often chew it and digest [defie] it with hot burning love, so that all the virtues of the soul and of the body be turned from fleshly living into Christ’s living, as bodily meat that is chewed and digested [defied] nourishes all the parts of a man’s body.135

In effect, as Vincent Gillespie says, lay people were being trained in metaphorical reading – reading God (lectio domini), rather than the traditional monastic practice of reading actual books (lectio divina).136 Like the author of Book to a Mother, Colonna wrote in the vernacular and her poems were primarily spiritual. Her perspective was distinctive, though, because she neither explains how the book of the Cross should be read, nor suggests that it should replace all written texts. Instead, she holds the Cross and the Bible together as she tried to navigate what we can describe as the tension between spiritual discernment (lectio domini) and meditative reading (lectio divina).137 As an author and an educated woman, she continued to emphasize literal reading, but her reading and writing were informed by this notion of metaphorical reading – the desire for an unmediated discernment of God.

as for contarini, recall the quote at the beginning of this chapter, when he reported that he wanted to read Plato, the Bible, “or similar

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authors” (o simili autori). In what sense are Plato and Scripture similar? And what are they similar to?138 It is an old truism that Plato was popular in the Renaissance, but as James Hankins notes, Plato’s fans had to elide enormous cultural, intellectual, and religious differences between the Greek philosopher and early-modern Christian culture. They were able to do so by drawing on varied traditions of exegesis.139 Unlike the exegetical interpreters Hankins discusses, however, Contarini is not worried about how to interpret or understand Plato and Scripture; he is interested in whether either can transform him. Here it is telling that he refers to authors (autori) rather than texts. By recounting his troubles with reading, Contarini indicates that the relationship to the author – a relationship enacted through the text – replaced traditional exegetical methods of absorbing the text’s meaning. Erasmus explored similar questions about the relationship between reading the book and reading its author. But as Lisa Jardine notes, he modeled this relationship more successfully than he explained it. As one of the great biblical scholars of his day, Erasmus maintained that the Word of God was the telos and culmination of all scholarly and spiritual reading – and also that it was uniquely easy to read and understand. In the Paraclesis, his preface to his Greek and Latin edition of the New Testament, Erasmus maintained that the philosophy of Christ contained in Scripture “easily penetrates into the minds of all, an action especially in accord with human nature.” Christian wisdom “may be drawn from its few books as from the most limpid springs with far less labor than Aristotle’s doctrine is extracted from so many obscure volumes. . . . The journey is simple, and it is ready for anyone.” Little is required of the reader because Scripture itself “provides inspiration” and “accommodates itself to all.” All that the reader needs is a “pious and open mind” and a “pure and simple faith.”140 Contarini’s account of reading Scripture and other spiritual works, in contrast, alerts us to the troubles that might await the reader who picked up the Bible: “This solace that I had proposed against every blow of fortune, that is the sacred letters, now did not give me any consolation and I doubt that there will come a time when they will delight.” This sense that reading should touch the heart was nothing new in Christianity. It was Augustine’s starting point and a premise that motivated monastic reading practices; Contarini’s frustrations signal a new need to clarify how books catalyze emotions. Moreover, if we follow Erasmus, the confident exegete and Scriptural scholar, a bit further we find a surprising ambivalence that, like Contarini’s, centers on how the reader – necessarily restricted by a finite human nature – can be transformed by the text. Both men give voice to the widening perception that, contra early humanists, it was difficult to achieve a union between

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eloquence and wisdom.141 In the Enchiridion (first published in 1503), Erasmus simply advised his readers to follow the model of spiritual exegesis provided by Jesus, Paul, Origen, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, and pseudo-Dionysius.142 In the Ratio of 1518, though, he cautioned against allegorical exegesis, and his textual and philological scholarship led him to emphasize the original sense of the text.143 This call to look for the writer, as Terence Cave rightly notes, led Erasmus into an endless regression of meaning far more complicated than the traditional method of allegorical exegesis. Erasmus responded by emphasizing that the reader is not so much trying to take possession of the original sense, as to encounter or to enter into a relationship with the writer. As he says of Cicero’s work, the text conveys the sense of a mind breathing even now the written word. At the same time, the reader should not lose himself in the writer: He should resist becoming a slavish imitator, a “false mirror.”144 This is the force of Erasmus’s argument in the Ciceronianus (1528), a work too often cited simply as an attack on Italian neopaganism. The reader must relish and absorb the text, then, in order to know the writer – but the reader must at the same time make the text his own. “I wouldn’t have anyone so dedicated to the imitation of Cicero that he abandons his own essential nature.”145 A putative debate about style then becomes the platform for a more ambiguous problem. Erasmus insists that Scriptural language is unique: “The divine wisdom has its own special eloquence.”146 But he emphasizes also that regardless of what one reads, reading is valuable insofar as it enables one to emulate the author’s character – to emulate, he means, as a son should emulate his father, rather than to imitate, as one might imitate another’s style by putting on his cloak without being shaped and molded by his spirit. Just as the goal in reading Scripture is to look beyond the literal sense, the goal in all reading is to learn that the words that transmit character are “mere words,” and one must look to “substance and sentiments, intellectual ability, right judgment.”147 It is easy to overlook the ambiguity in what Erasmus expected from the reader because he projects unwavering confidence, especially in contrast to Contarini’s anxious uncertainty. The complexity of the question is underscored, though, by the very fact that Erasmus took up the issue of Ciceronianism (the relative obscurity of which was signaled by the fact that to argue his case he invoked a protagonist who had died in poverty several years earlier) and turned it into a complex treatise about how to read fruitfully. The main issue was deceptively simple: How should the reader recover the sensus from the verbal surface? Although Cave’s reading of Erasmus does not see in the Dutch humanist the anxieties about affective transformation that so concerned Contarini, we need only extend Cave’s analysis slightly to reveal that this vexing issue was at the center of Erasmus’s reading rubric: Where systems

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of allegory failed, the affective bond between writer and reader succeeded. Cave suggests that this was the source of Erasmus’s cautious optimism – a conclusion belied by Cave’s own analysis of how Erasmus found it enormously tricky to establish and sustain this bond. The frantic work of scholarship, itself a testimony to the difficulty of excavating the writer, is Erasmus’s busy alternative to Contarini’s solitary melancholy, and their very different demeanors conceal a similar perplexity.148

alone with a book and a pen The concerns expressed by people like Contarini, Colonna, or Erasmus as they opened a book and picked up a pen was – and is – not readily apparent, because as the numerous portrayals of St. Jerome and Erasmus attest, the solitary scholar was a cultural icon in the Renaissance. By the sixteenth century, this image of scholarly solitude had relatively widespread appeal. In earlier centuries, most scholars were in monasteries or universities, and the visual image of the book appeared primarily as a powerful symbol of the divine Logos. As a broader reading public emerged toward the end of the Middle Ages, late medieval manuscripts offered quotidian images of lay people reading, and portrayed books more prosaically, as objects people read.149 With the rise of private studies (made more desirable and more comfortable by technological developments like the chimney stack and a new emphasis on design symmetry), lay people had somewhere to go when they wanted to read. Private studies were partially inspired by monastic cells,150 and of course the idea of relishing scholarly solitude had classical precedent as well.151 Classical authors insisted that the public man should refresh himself through periodic retreats to suburban villas, and Renaissance humanists who eschewed the monastery nevertheless celebrated the joy of sitting alone with a book.152 Studious seclusion was enthusiastically embraced by intellectuals in the Roman empire and revivified in the fourteenth century, most notably by Petrarch, who abandoned papal Avignon in order to commune with his books in a secluded villa, popularizing a model that was frequently emulated by lay scholars.153 When Thomas More lamented that he had no time for his books and thus no time for himself, he reiterated a common complaint. As Ermolao Barbaro, a Venetian who was born some fifty years before More put it in celebrating his fall from grace in fifteenth-century Venice: “O happy calamity, which has restored letters to me and me to letters and indeed myself to myself.”154 We know now that these claims to solitude had social ramifications. As Foucault trenchantly observed, “The care of the self constitute[s] not an exercise in solitude but a true social practice.” This insight has been fully

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exploited by those who study early-modern science, reading, art, and architecture. Scholars have, for example, helpfully reminded us that claims to solitude seldom reflected reality. Studies, laboratories, and libraries alike were usually crowded with people – tutors, scribes, students, friends, and members of the extended family who populated affluent households. In Renaissance Europe, moreover, the presence of a study affirmed that its inhabitant was socially important and needed space both to reflect and to display the books and other objets d’art that demonstrated their owner’s intellectual interests. Renaissance painters depicted princes and businessmen surrounded by books and other collectibles in order to signal wealth and intellectual seriousness. Individual readers facilitated social knowledge – and in the process they made reading both pragmatic and performative. The significance of this has been vividly demonstrated by Steven Shapin’s work and his demonstration that, for example, a seventeenth-century scientist like Robert Boyle gained credence for his experimental methods and conclusions by presenting himself as an ascetic scholar.155 This emphasis on the public cachet of privacy sheds some light on Contarini and Colonna’s retreat. In Contarini’s case, his reputation as a pious, intellectual lay man confirmed his standing as a respectable member of one of Venice’s oligarchic families. His villa visibly affirmed that he, like the Roman leaders Renaissance Italians were so eager to emulate, understood the importance of withdrawing from public life in order to return, refreshed and renewed, to the serious business of governing. He transacted public knowledge by composing political treaties and ecclesial reports and by writing a history of Venice, and he liked to talk and study with his friends. In Colonna’s case, living in a convent contributed to the public perception that she was a devout, virtuous woman, and may explain why she was not critiqued for writing and (however unwillingly) publishing her work. The claim that private space had public ramifications does not adequately describe the significance of their scholarly withdrawal, however. Contarini turned to his books not only – not even primarily – to shore up status or to prepare for a return to public life, but also to create a religious life. As we saw in Chapter 2, ambivalence about patronage and professionalism led pious men of letters to seek a space that was not defined by instrumental calculations of reciprocity and status. Rather than subscribing to the prevailing view that a study was a place where one went to acquire the skills, knowledge, and energy needed to make money, accrue power, and consolidate social status, they invested the study with spiritual value.156 Women of letters, meanwhile, were already located in the place these men sought to inhabit.Under the influence of gendered strictures rather than the pressures of patronage

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and professionalism, highly educated lay women were similarly interested in synthesizing spirituality and scholarship. This seems to correspond to Grafton and Jardine’s determination that the inclusion of women in humanist circles was a sign that humanists were taking themselves out of the game. Instead of trying to be independent professionals or socially challenging intellectuals, they were content to promote themselves as purveyors of high culture who supported the status quo. Their work, then, was recondite and arcane, socially valorized but useless, not unlike a noblewoman’s needlework. Male intellectuals’ willingness to applaud women who read and wrote only confirmed this self-perception. Interested in how humanism became an upper-class ideology, though, Grafton and Jardine overlooked the religious ramifications (and the utopic characteristics) of this search for a space apart.157 Rather than trying to locate this search along a two-dimensional spectrum with private at one end and public at the other, we should see it as a quest for a third option: the communal. In and through their texts, people like Contarini and Colonna sought to create a relationship with God – a relationship that was neither private nor public, at least not as we commonly define those terms. When we say “private” now, we mean either a self-contained interiority or a sphere defined by contrast with its antonym “public.” But the spirituali imagined that seeking God required relational self-transformation (though their notions about what that entailed varied); they believed, in other words, that their textual encounters would transform them intellectually and emotionally – and draw them closer to God. Where reading and writing failed, they looked to their relationships with other people to help them achieve the same goal. But this is the subject for the next chapter.

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4

Necessary Relationships: Desire for God and Each Other

D

uring the year when he was imprisoned in the tower of London, Thomas More wrote an eloquent letter of apology to his friend Antonio Bonvisi, regretting that he had not adequately fulfilled his obligation to be a good friend, and hoping that his debt might still be paid:

I therefore, my dear friend and of all mortal men to me most dearest, do (which now only I am able to do) earnestly pray to Almighty God, which hath provided you for me, that sith he hath given you such a debtor as shall never be able to pay you, that it may please him of his benignity, to requite this bountifulness of yours, which you every day thus plenteously pour upon me.1

Peering over More’s shoulder, the modern reader may be amused by the promiscuous flattery and self-abnegation required in Renaissance friendships. Among the upper classes, friends used pledges of affection and intimacy to make claims and fulfill debts, and they insisted that their relationships enacted ideals of parity, reciprocity, and persuasive communication. As recent studies of friendship in early modern Europe have emphasized, this glorifying rhetoric manifested a deep uneasiness about new forms of social and political power; Renaissance friends wanted to create an alternative to relationships based on utilitarian calculations of patronage and political power, and they wanted to create a model for a civil society. Friendship, then (the studies have concluded), essentially was a way to navigate a society roiled by power struggles.2 The social dynamic is not the only one that should be considered, however. More’s invocation of God was not incidental, nor was his subsequent description of heaven merely a poignant coda: And that for his mercy’s sake [God] will bring us from this wretched and stormy world, into his rest, where we shall need no letters, where no wall shall dissever 118

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us, where no porter shall keep us from talking together, but that we may have the fruition of the eternal joy with God the Father, and with his only begotten Son our Redeemer Jesus Christ, with the holy spirit of them both, the Holy Ghost proceeding from them both.3

More’s flowery description of what friends owe to one another and his description of heaven as a place of perfect friendship are two sides of the same coin. A vision of heaven, like the theological definition of God, is not just a corrective, a template people use to measure the shortcomings of the world they live in. Instead it is a way for people to envision and express other possibilities.4 When More imagines friends talking without interruption, without walls or written words, he both imagines an alternative to the world of jails and jailors, and also articulates a way to achieve it. This emphasis on seeking out transformative relationships was pervasive among pious literati. As our previous chapters suggest, this was due to the problems they encountered both in society and alone in their studies. Ambivalence about patronage and professional identity motivated them to align themselves with a separate realm, a realm infused with spiritual value. Uncertainty about how they could be transformed by reading and writing reinforced their reliance on relationships. Pulled in different directions by questions about how to know God and achieve salvation, these intellectuals responded like pens in a spirograph, interweaving connections between texts, friendships, and the divine. What emerged was a densely relational pattern of transcendence and transformation. As the image suggests, the literati encountered the sacred not as an abstracted Other – a fixed point in the distance – but as part of a dynamic process. The divine thus imbued their relationships with transcendent value, even as they used their relationships to seek the divine. The most important boundary, then, was between those who were actively engaged in the relational quest for the divine and those who were not. In this context – and only in this context – social and theoretical distinctions that were otherwise crucial even within this highly privileged crowd (between men and women, between friends and advisors, between parity and hierarchy) became less important than the shared goal of self-transcendence. This is not to say that all the pious literati pursued this end the same way. For instance Contarini and Erasmus were more intent on relational transformation, while Pole and Colonna (by contrast) focused more explicitly on transcendence. These were variations of emphasis, though, rather than differences in kind. In all cases, as we will soon see, the search for the sacred was tightly bound up with relationships that included women as well as men.

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Thomas More and his family c. 1528, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497?–1543). Margaret Roper is the second figure from the right side of the drawing. Credit: Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kupferstichkabinett. Used with permission.

desire for transcendence: margaret more roper Consider Margaret More Roper. In Holbein’s famous sketch of the More household, Roper and her father are the two most prominent figures. More sits in a chair, regally robed and squarely in the center of the picture; Roper kneels at his feet, grouped together with her mother and sister. Holbein makes Roper stand out, though, by placing her closest to the observer, giving her nearly twice the scale of the other seated figures. Although most of the figures in the picture (with the interesting exception of More’s fool, Henry Patenson, who will be discussed in Chapter 5) look demurely at another person or at a book, Roper and More both stare off into space, lost in thought.5 Through their shared absorption in the disembodied realm of ideas they transcend the gendered hierarchy they otherwise embody. Roper’s access to ideas and intellectual status was controlled by her father and other men; nevertheless, her ability to participate in the world of learning gave her (as Jonathan Goldberg observes) a distinctive capacity to assert her own desires. According to More’s early biographer Thomas Stapleton, Roper wrote prose and verse in Greek and Latin, speeches in Latin – including a

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response to a declamation purportedly written by Quintilian – and demonstrated her capacity for critical scholarship by emending a corrupt passage in St. Cyprian.6 And, of course, Roper composed the Devout treatise upon the Pater noster (1524), an English translation of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica. Although they viewed them as being different from original compositions, Renaissance intellectuals valued translations in a way that academics today do not.7 By translating Erasmus’s text Roper imitated his creative act, and in the process composed a new message about the relationship between Christians and their god.8 For example, where Erasmus wrote that God sees petitioners as sons (filios), Roper uses the gender-neutral English word “children.” And where Erasmus observed that God sees sons, not sinners (ut & tu pater agnoscas filios non degeneres), Roper’s translation elaborates on the etymological significance of “degeneres” to subvert the importance of earthly families: “whereby you father may acknowledge us as thy natural children and not out of kynde.” Thus the earthly father who generates sinful (degenerate) children is effaced by the heavenly father who can now, thanks to Christ, claim all Christians as his “natural” children.9 With this message of spiritual equality between men and women (and in light of the primacy of the divine over the human father), Roper was herself a generative force: By translating and transforming the meaning of Erasmus’s words, she created a new kind of earthly petitioner, a new child of God.10 This was a move akin to Colonna’s declaration that she became her nephew’s parent by guiding his education.11 Through their involvement in learned culture, these two women claimed a form of creativity that was not biologically determined. As an intellectual creator – a learned writer – Roper thus inscribed a relationship with Christ that sanctioned her inclusion in an intellectual community as an equal alongside her father. The argument that Roper overturned her subordination to her earthly father by asserting she was first and foremost a child of God – and part of a community defined by faith rather than earthly kinship – may sound familiar:12 Female prophets, saints, and mystics in many traditions and diverse historical contexts have invoked the sacred to challenge existing forms of social and political power.13 Goldberg’s analysis suggests that we should not be content to apply this model to Roper, however, because her work was less a claim to social authority than an assertion of desire. As he reveals, Roper worked within a web of eroticized relationships – between More and God, between Roper and More, and between Roper and Christ. Thus in a conversation that More reportedly had with his daughter shortly before his death, he told Margaret that he envisioned himself as God’s pampered pet, cosseted on the divine lap: “Me thinketh God maketh me a wanton, and setteth me on His lap and dandleth me.”14 Roper uses similarly erotic language when she praises More’s

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letters in the same terms she uses to describe Christ’s body: “your most fruteful and delectable letter, the faithfull messenger of your very virtuous and gostly minde, rid from all corrupt love of worldly thinges.”15 Goldberg argues that Roper thereby disrupted hierarchies by making the sexually charged (described by Jonathan Crewe as incestuous) relationship between herself and More part of an equalized exchange of desire. This provocative analysis should be paired with Germain Marc’hadour’s more traditional argument (that Roper merged three kinds of love – Christian charity, natural love, and filial devotion) to serve the broader point that Roper’s writings express her longing for meaning, transcendence, and love, and also articulate her own responses to those desires.16 Expressions of creativity and desire did not change material or political conditions for women in sixteenth-century Europe. The desire expressed by Margaret Roper is important for our purposes, though, because it manifests a yearning – an existential search for self-transcendence – evident in other pious literati as well. Desire marks distance and absence: To yearn for something is to envision it as somehow outside of oneself, beyond reach. The desire for God led medieval Christian contemplatives to use prayers and (often extreme forms of) devotional practices to (as Amy Hollywood puts it) “lacerate subjectivity” – thereby creating a place within themselves where the divine might dwell.17 By contrast, the search for self-transcendence among learned Catholic reformers was relational. This is not to say that they did not pray and meditate. Thomas More spent hours each night praying in his personal chapel. The book by Erasmus that Roper translated was itself an exegesis of a prayer – the “Our Father.” Colonna was devoutly ascetic – so much so that Pole admonished her to moderate her practices. And Pole himself was frequently hailed as an exemplary practitioner of pious devotions. But even as each of these people pursued solitary practices, they found they could not seek God without each other.18

desire for transcendence: vittoria colonna Vittoria Colonna (as an example of those who needed the company of others to seek God) moved dialectically between a contemplative reliance on God and interactions with others (real and imagined); in the process, she rewrote her earthly attachments in light of her desire for Christ. Even as she affirmed that illumination and grace were uniquely effective in guiding the seeker,19 she also sought out mediators. In a meditative poem about Mary Magdalene, Colonna celebrated the saint as a solitary figure she wanted to emulate; she wrote that this admiration allowed her to envision herself free of the earthly desires that saddened her – but only because she envisioned Magdalene as a companion. Addressing this saint directly, Colonna explained that she wanted to stand in

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her footsteps and follow her holy works; this, Colonna hoped, would enable her to “take hold of the divine” and bring her to a place where “the desire stops, the crying stops.”20 This belief that mortal love was necessarily tragic was something Colonna shared with many other Christians. Her husband often had left her alone when he was alive, and his death unleashed a destructive grief.21 The poem’s climactic description expresses Colonna’s conviction that true happiness would be found when she shed earthly attachments and moved beyond desire and tears, but as the invocation of Mary Magdalene reminds us, it reflects also her belief that other people would help her find that happiness. We might thereby interpret Colonna as someone who synthesized Christian neoplatonism and the traditional cult of saints. In a neoplatonic worldview, mortal love was important because it could lift the lover from the mundane to the sublime – from love for another human being, to a spiritualized understanding of that love, to rest finally in love for God. Friendship could be understood as the model for “platonic love” insofar as it was an intellectual love based on love of God.22 The cult of saints, by contrast, was based on the logic of association rather than ascent, and affirmed that those who knew God best could help others know him well. Saints were most readily described as patrons or protectors, but they were also friends of God and – potentially – of anyone who sought them out.23 In the eighth century, for example, the Eastern Christian theologian John of Damascus used pseudo-Dionysius and the emphasis on friendship in the Gospel of John to create a theology of icons that put a new emphasis on relationships. As Peter Brown points out, ecclesial art subsequently changed in the East, as the shimmering decorations meant to evoke paradise were cleared out to make room for icons, which stood out (as they had not before) as individual objects demanding the believer’s concentrated veneration. What was new, Brown explains, “was the desire to see clearly recognizable human faces of the saints and, through these faces, to enter into a direct relationship with invisible protectors – with Christ, with the Virgin, and with the saints.”24 In the sixteenth century, as Colonna and her friends can show us, an analogous synthesis had different effects. Rather than suggesting, as John of Damascus did, that all of creation was itself an icon, and other people were images through which one could see as through a glass darkly to God, Colonna and her friends melded the neoplatonic emphasis on love with the notion of helpmate and guide. What was new, then, was not the desire to see the human faces of saints, but rather the inverse: to see the holy in and through other humans – to enter into a direct relationship with God with the help of human friends apart from an established cult of saints. This was how Colonna’s most famous friend, Michelangelo, envisioned their relationship. The two met in 1536, when he was in his sixties and working

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on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; they met and corresponded frequently until Colonna’s death in 1547. Between 1541 and 1544, when Colonna moved to a convent in Viterbo to be near Reginald Pole, she repeatedly returned to Rome “solely” in order to visit Michelangelo – or so his biographer reported in 1550.25 Michelangelo complained even so that he did not see enough of Colonna, and she once chided him for writing her so frequently.26 Each called the other “friend,” and Michelangelo underscored the parity of their relationship by using amico, the masculine version of the noun and describing Colonna elsewhere as a “man within a woman.”27 This signals an intriguing confusion of gendered signification rather than simple inversion: In his poems Michelangelo also writes of Colonna in classically neoplatonic terms as a woman who inspires him with her beauty (often in language that recalls Dante on Beatrice) – and, to add another twist, also professes love for his male friend, Tommaso Cavalieri, in much the same terms. Though Colonna and Cavalieri differed in age, sex, and social standing (and Michelangelo’s poems for Cavalieri were more passionate), there was a similar theme in the multiple poems he wrote for each of these friends. In Christopher Ryan’s words, the theme was that “love enhances the poet’s aspiration towards friendship with God.” Without his loving friends, Michelangelo found this friendship with God difficult to achieve. In a rare instance where he addressed God directly, he ended on a note of pleading rather than confidence: I cannot change my old established habits, which, as more days pass, weigh down and compel me more. . . . O Lord, in my last hours, stretch out toward me your merciful arms, take me from myself and make me one who’ll please you.28

More often, he addressed God through another person. Probably, as most who work on Michelangelo’s spirituality affirm, he believed that human salvation depended on Christ’s atoning death, and that it was Christ who made it possible for one person to help another.29 But in Michelangelo’s poetry, as Ryan observes, this doctrine is usually assumed rather than stated, and in most of his poems to Colonna, “it is she who is portrayed as the immediate source of his movement from evil to good, from death to life.”30 The faith Michelangelo had in God and Christ, then, was realized through his friendships: The more I keep hating and fleeing from myself, the more I run to you for help, my lady, with honest hope; and my soul fears for me less, the more I’m close to you.31

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Like Contarini, Michelangelo thought that his friends could enable him to feel the consuming love for God that otherwise eluded him; his plaintive question about why this emotion is so hard to achieve has echoes of Contarini’s lament about how hard it is to experience transformative passion: Why does it come so slowly, and why not more often, that inner ardor, full of steady faith, that lifts me from the earth?32

Invoking a typically Petrarchan antithesis (“one freezes my heart, the other sets it on fire”),33 Michelangelo insists that when he is thinking about or gazing on Colonna he can “aspire to the good”34 but without her his “low mind” casts about fruitlessly, unable to “draw forth from it anything but death.”35 But human friendships, as he writes in a poem to Cavalieri, can enable one to find God: My eyes did not see any mortal object when I found complete peace in your beautiful eyes, but saw within them, where every evil’s despised, him who invests my soul, so like him, with love.

This sort of friendship is itself a kind of salvation: . . . our love makes us perfect friends down here, but even more, through death, in heaven.36

This impulse to visualize heaven as a place of perfect friendship – with the frisson of a suggestion that love between friends is heaven on earth – was evident also in Thomas More’s letter to Bonvisi. This relational spirituality is a corollary to the notion of platonic friendship elaborated by the Italian neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century: Instead of a relationship purified by love of God, friendship defined the style of interacting that made God’s love present. Colonna and Michelangelo exemplify this not only in the content of their poems but also in the gifts they gave. Colonna firmly denied that she wanted her poems published, and her work was usually disseminated by intermediaries. In 1540, though, she herself prepared two different collections of poems to give as gifts, one to Michelangelo and the other to Marguerite de Navarre. In turn the two presented her with gifts of their own work.37 Michelangelo was usually loathe to accept gifts because of the obligation they imposed, but he accepted Colonna’s poems and presented her with several drawings (Christ on the Cross, a Pietà, and Christ and the Woman of Samaria at the Well).38 As he did so he insisted that their exchanges differed from others

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precisely because the gifts did not demand recompense, but instead were gratuitous offerings – and thereby, as he said explicitly, analogous to divine grace:39 “I desired to produce something for you with my own hand, in order to be as little as possible unworthy of this kindness. I have now come to recognize that the grace of God is not to be bought, and that to keep it waiting is a grievous sin.” In the spiritual realm they were creating through their exchanges, Michelangelo shed his aversion to gifts: “Therefore I acknowledge my error, and willingly accept your favors.”40 Gifts given and received on these spiritual terms affirm that the relationships they solidify are beyond calculations of gain or reward; they are, to borrow from Derrida, “beyond economy.”41 The pictures Michelangelo gave to Colonna represented a new category of art, so-called presentation drawings that were intended as private gifts and therefore separate from the system of patronage and commissions. The exchange of poems and pictures between Michelangelo and Colonna thus is often interpreted as symptomatic of a widespread privatization of art.42 But if privatized in the sense that they were restricted to an elite sphere, these exchanges were also communal. Thus Leonard Barkan characterizes them as “acts of introspection transferred into privacy a deux, but beyond that often circulated within a larger, but still private coterie.”43 Alexander Nagel helpfully elaborates on this point by demonstrating that the drawings and poems alike demanded a relational response from the viewer called to interpret the friend’s work. Colonna recognized that Michelangelo’s drawing of the virgin provoked her to meditate in new ways on the relationship between Mary and Christ, and she insisted that Michelangelo instructed and aided her just as she did him, in a way that could not be separated from the immediacy of their relationship. When she thanked Michelangelo for sending her a drawing of a cross that helped her meditate on Christ’s suffering, she wanted to know whether Michelangelo drew it. If it was not from his own hand, or copied by him, it could not hold the same place in her life: “Nor is it possible to see a better, more alive, more completely achieved image and certainly I could never describe how subtly and marvelously it is done, for which reason I have decided that I do not want one done by some other hand, so please let me know if this is by someone else, in which case, never mind. In any case, if it is yours, I would like to keep it.”44 The work itself conveyed its own demands– demands that were inextricable from the relationship between the giver and the recipient, the painter and the viewer, the poet and the reader. (As Colonna put it in another letter, “your works forcibly stimulate the judgment of all who look at them. My study of them made me speak of adding goodness to things perfect in themselves, and I have seen now that ‘all is possible to him who believes.’”45 )

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Deeply influenced by the idea that religion was interiorized in the early modern era, we tend to assume that this focus on personal interpretation was symptomatic. In this respect Nagel’s otherwise innovative analysis is typical: He concludes that Michelangelo and Colonna’s gift exchanges became “a privileged model for a more ‘interiorised’ conception of religious faith, one that emphasized the direct relation between divine grace and the believer’s conscience.”46 This conclusion effaces the significance of human relationships, however, even though Nagel’s own analysis highlights the dynamic interaction between friends. In contrast with the notion that interactions like the exchanges between Colonna and Michelangelo led the participants to focus on God – and to a deeper conviction about the need for gratuitous grace – we need to underscore that these demands were understood and accepted only insofar as they were encountered within a relationship between friends. Thus it is telling that although Michelangelo survived Colonna by nearly twenty years, he never again drew any pictures in the style of those he sent to her.47 The exchanges between the two, in other words, were not just about theological interpretation; they also were about community. Through the exchange of pictures and poems, Colonna and Michelangelo created a common identity based not on social or familial likeness, but on shared cosmological premises or perceptions of sacredness. In this way the participants assured themselves that at least with each other they lived a life defined by spiritual rather than utilitarian values.48 As with the other characters in this study, Michelangelo looked to his friends to find some relief from the ambivalence he felt about his social role: “Tell the priest not to address me any more ‘to Michelangelo, sculptor,’ because I am known here in no way but as Michelangelo Buonarotti, and if a Florentine citizen wants an altarpiece painted he must find a painter, for I was never a painter or sculptor like the ones who keep a shop. I have always avoided that for the honor of my father and brothers, although I have served three popes, which has been perforce.”49 Though he had created many things (including altarpieces) on commission, Michelangelo did not want himself or his work to be defined by commercial transactions just as he did not want gifts that embroiled him in an economy of exchange. He longed instead for relationships that transcended these calculations.

the importance of exchanges between friends is evident also in Colonna’s relationship with Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549): Although the two never met, they nevertheless professed themselves dependent on one another. Like Colonna, Marguerite de Navarre was a writer deeply influenced by leading reformers of her day, and by the message that the Spirit

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makes Christ’s salvation available to those who respond through what her mentor Guillaume Briçonnet (1470–1534) called the “living water of faith.”50 Marguerite de Navarre knew Latin, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew; in addition to her poem “Mirror of the Sinful Soul,” she wrote a famous series of stories known as the Heptameron. She and Colonna probably began corresponding by the late 1530s; the first surviving letter of their correspondence is from 1540, and it showcases Colonna’s need to have a relationship with those who inspire her. In her letter, Colonna explains that she has long sought a guide and, convinced that “the examples of one’s own sex are easier to follow,” she lit on Marguerite as the only woman outside Italy who joined “the perfection of the will together with that of the intellect.”51 Here – as with Michelangelo’s varied descriptions of Colonna – we see again an intriguing mix of gendered specificity (in Colonna’s emphasis on “the examples of one’s own sex”) with ungendered qualities: She extols in Marguerite the virtues of will and intellect she praises in men. What Colonna seeks is not merely an exemplary guide, but also a friend. In a passage that draws an explicit analogy between her desire for Marguerite and her desire for God, Colonna explains that the geographic distance between herself and Marguerite had left her . . . saddened and filled with fear – like the Jews who were seeing the fire and glory of God on the mountain top, which they, as yet imperfect, did not dare climb; and in the silence of their hearts they asked the Lord that His Deity, becoming incarnate in the Word, might condescend to draw near to them (just as in spiritual needs the merciful hand of the Lord met their entreaties, first with the water spilling miraculously from the rock, then with the heavenly manna).52

So, too, does Colonna hope to overcome her separation from Marguerite. Casting the Frenchwoman in the role of divine mediator, she insists that letters are not enough. She has an “intense desire” that can only be satisfied by meeting Marguerite in person and hearing her speak. This encounter, she explains, would itself be an “infinite good grace” akin to the gift God bestowed on the Jews: And as with the Jews the outworking of God’s grace far exceeded all their expectations, so to me the benefits of seeing Your Majesty will, I feel, exceed anything I may desire.53

Colonna reinforces the parallel between God’s relationship with humanity and her own with Marguerite by invoking New Testament imagery as well: Maybe, as the servant John preceded our Lord, so it please God that I may similarly serve as that voice, which in the desert of our miseries proclaims to all in Italy to prepare the way for the desired coming of Your Majesty.

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At first glance this analogy seems ludicrous: Marguerite was not a well-known preacher nor a charismatic visionary; elsewhere in the same letter Colonna, the would-be prophet, suggests that what she longs for is more a tête-à-tête than a revival meeting. The analogy fits with the rest of Colonna’s message, though, if we recognize that she uses it to underscore the importance of speech and the belief that human relationships could be the source of salvific revelation. Throughout their letters Colonna and Marguerite repeatedly claim that the things of this world are unimportant compared to God, yet they need the speech and friendship of the other to learn that lesson. Colonna describes Marguerite’s letters as a source of consolation, help, strength, and grace that makes it possible for her to turn toward God: “The more distant I feel myself to be from such perfection, so much more do your powerful words excite my desire.” Marguerite’s words catalyzed Colonna’s desire, because they were expressed by a loving friend who proved her love by weeping when she heard the (false) report of Colonna’s death. Responding to Marguerite’s account of this event, Colonna wrote that Marguerite’s tears “had no less effect on me than those other tears had on Him for whom Christ groaned in the Spirit.”54 For her part, Marguerite averred that the “friendship that was started by reputation” had deepened through mutual affection, and now showed her the difference between human glory and spiritual values: The love you bear me . . . shows me the difference that exists between worldly and external triumphs and honors, and the beauty and loveliness of the daughter and true spouse of the one and great King, God.55

Just as Colonna identified Marguerite with Christ and herself with John the Baptist, Marguerite here suggests that Colonna is like Mary – an exemplar who illuminates the difference between sacred and profane. Colonna’s “good offices” enable Marguerite to persevere in faith, but only insofar as she has access to Colonna through letters: “For this reason it is necessary that you continue to pray and write your useful letters without becoming tired of sending them.”56 Thus the correspondence between Marguerite and Colonna shows that their desire had two objects – God and another human being. In their experience, the two were inseparable.

although colonna insists on the importance of female exemplars, the desire expressed in these letters was not gendered. With men and women alike Colonna gave and received poems, spiritual advice, and gratitude, and she praised female exemplars for the same qualities she lauded in men: learning and spiritual enlightenment, perfection of the will and the

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intellect.57 In his study of Reginald Pole, Thomas Mayer argues a related point when he concludes that Pole’s circle of friends constituted a “gender refuge.” Taking the question of Pole’s sexual desires as his starting point, Mayer argues that Pole was pushed to withdraw in part because of the dominant culture’s condemnation of sex between men. Though the question of who (if anyone) Pole had sex with seems to be unanswerable, Mayer shows how the evidence from letters and pictures alike reveals Pole’s ardent longing for other men. Thus he concludes that “Pole and his circles fall under the rubric of ‘homosocial desire.’” Noting that this rubric corresponds with the Ciceronian claim that friends must be alike in all things, Mayer glosses his conclusion by explaining that Pole’s “withdrawal” was then a kind of resistance, a “deliberate choice of amicitia over both tyranny and hierarchy of whatever sort.”58 But Pole’s circle also included Colonna, and although he expressed erotic longing only for a few male friends (Camillo Orsini, Marcantonio Flaminio, and Giovanni Morone), Colonna was clearly part of his separate sphere, set apart from the world of political calculations. Her prominent place in his life reminds us that the rubric was not solely “homosocial,” and that other desires commingled with sexual longing. During the years when Colonna and Pole both lived in Viterbo, they met frequently and, surrounded by friends in a garden, often spoke so intently of spiritual things that their friends could not hear what they were saying: “Pole often spoke with the Signora, both at Rome and Viterbo, and always, I believe, about things of God, because they both enjoyed this subject more than any other. . . . Neither I nor anyone else was able to understand (intendere) the details of their conversation.”59 Pietro Carnesecchi provided this description to an inquisitor who was trying to determine whether Pole and Colonna shared heretical beliefs, and an aura of suspicion and fear clings to the scene. But this tableau of two figures with their heads close together shimmers also with the intensity of their belief that in each other they had found powerful intercessors and spiritual pedagogues.60 After his mother’s death in 1541, Pole thanked Colonna for her letters, saying that no one had consoled him as she had and naming her as his new mother.61 Bynum’s famous argument about how men used maternal imagery not to reify sexual differences but to create alternatives to hierarchical models of authority holds in this context, for Pole also used metaphors of motherhood in relation to men.62 Writing to Camillo Orsini – a powerful Roman nobleman – shortly after being appointed cardinal, Pole described how he was consoled by suckling at Orsini’s breasts; likening them both to mothers, Pole wrote that when he heard Orsini’s voice, “the child in the womb of my soul immediately exulted for joy . . . and I felt the fruit of your soul acting on the fruit of the womb of my soul.” The “God of consolation” gestating in Orsini’s womb enabled Pole to feel as though the

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mother of God had come to him.63 In a letter to Colonna, moreover, Pole moved from metaphor to reality when he said explicitly that women need not have a fixed role.64 For her part, Colonna embraced the maternal role, and although she did not use feminine imagery to describe Pole, the fluidity of gender is evident in the fact that she likened him as well as Marguerite to Christ, and praised them both as an ideal mix of learned and saintly.65 As Pole’s “mother,” Colonna presented herself alternately as comforting, nurturing, and seeking aid.66 In a poem she sent to Pole along with a drawing of Christ, she created a nexus of ardor – Christ’s on the cross, what she and Pole felt for each other, and the love of the divine they shared: “Perhaps, driven by an eager burning passion . . . you’ll welcome this familiar image; so I thought, as your new mother, / humble servant, I’d send you a drawing / of what a Master created in you.”67 Thus Colonna balanced the conflation of mother and servant with a claim to the role of teacher and transmitter of spiritual passion. Just as Margaret Roper, the desirous daughter, used her relationship as a child and sibling of Christ to rewrite her relationship with her father, so Colonna’s longing for God sanctioned her relationship with Pole – as a mother who was both spiritual mentor and student. This is not to argue that the eroticism was fully spiritualized. In his deft work on “closet devotions” in seventeenth-century England, Richard Rambuss rightly warns against the prudish impulse to draw sharp distinctions between sexual and spiritual desire. Colonna herself addresses the connection when she writes that she is happy about a newly close relationship between Pole and Morone because she hoped it would deflect criticism from those who believed she was enslaved to Pole by a pride that was “too maternally carnal and such things.”68 When scholars put sex back into the discussion, however, they seem to be ineluctably drawn to gender-specific categories. Thus Rambuss focuses on a homosexual scenario (male devotion to a male god); and, as we have seen, despite the fact that in his book about Pole, Mayer repeatedly emphasizes that Colonna was a key character in Pole’s circle of friends, his discussion of Pole’s homosexuality culminates in a claim that Pole withdrew to a “homosocial” sphere.69 We need instead to analyze how desires can forge communities without reinforcing gendered distinctions. The corresponding lack of interest in gender roles was not unique. In a study of English Renaissance literature, Laurie Shannon has shown that gender differences receded because of shared fears about tyranny. In this context, friendships were triangulated by the haunting presence of the absent (potentially tyrannical) sovereign.70 Conceived in this way, the sovereign was an oppositional force that authorized women and men alike to create an alternative ideal. Shannon’s analysis illuminates the

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very different significance friendship had for pious literati. In contrast to the tyrannical sovereign, the sacred was not that against which friends defined themselves, but that toward which they aspired. In this sense the sacred was analogous to beauty in Renaissance art. In Elizabeth Cropper’s terms, there was in Renaissance art a nexus of aesthetic and amorous claims. Cropper argues that Renaissance artists were influenced by the “Petrarchan culture of desire,” and so invoked a beholder who was supposed to relate to a picture as if to a lover. Thus the beholder was gendered, but the beauty beheld was not (or, perhaps more accurately, Renaissance notions of beauty mixed masculine and feminine).71 Similarly, in the web of friendship that drew together Pole, Colonna, Michelangelo, and Marguerite de Navarre, for instance, we have a fusion of spiritual and amorous claims that displaced gender – not because devotion to God effaced all social distinctions, but because the triangulation between God, friends, and spiritual seekers stretched the links between sex and devotion and created room for a desire that did not restrict itself to human categories of sexual difference.72

conversation and consolation The concern with how and where friends might find ways to exchange thoughts, affection, and spiritual sustenance is expressed with particular intensity throughout Contarini’s letters. When he complains about how his friends’ move to a hermitage has left him far from their conversation (luntano da la vostra conversation), Contarini invokes not only the traditional meaning of conversation (to live or commune with) and the notion that he wanted to be with his friends, but also an emerging definition (the verbal exchange of ideas) and the idea that he wanted to be with them in order to talk to them. His friends who had chosen to live away from him were now distant not only because they were physically absent, but more specifically because their choice proclaimed that a way of life concentrated exclusively on God was more important than the kind of interactive mediation that Contarini sought in friendship.73 What we know about Contarini’s views on conversation comes from his letters, and as the nature of the evidence suggests, Contarini was of course able to use written words to convey effectively his dissatisfaction about having to write instead of talk. Nevertheless, his lack of enthusiasm about having to write signals a diminution in the humanist assumption that texts were desirable media for dialogue.74 For Contarini, writing a letter was an act that underscored the loss of the immediacy he craved, and the direct and intimate tone of his letters contrasts markedly with the humanist tradition of composing letters that were intended not only for the current recipient

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but also for posterity.75 Consequently, he frequently revisited the issue of how correspondence might recreate the conversation he valued. “I would be . . . grateful,” he wrote to Giustiniani, “if you would write me some words, so that at least in this way I would be able to talk things over with you.”76 His resigned aside (“at least in this way”) reveals his conviction that even if letters could substitute, the oral exchange of ideas remained the touchstone. Similarly, Contarini asked Querini to write to him so that he would not “be deprived of conversing with you as I had thought.”77 Contarini explained his hope that through letters “we would be able to speak for a long time with you,” and thereby perhaps “make up for the discussion that we were once accustomed to have together here in Venice.” Contarini invariably underscored his ardent requests for letters with these sorts of reference to lost conversations. When he assured Querini that “it will not be bothersome to you to spend a few hours of your day in writing me,”78 he supported this demand by asserting that their epistolary exchange fed “what I desired of your conversation which so delights me.”79 Even as he conceded that he and his friends could talk through their letters, Contarini continued to measure epistolary texts against the standard of presence. By nature and by obligation, friends were fellow travelers, conduits to God, and helpmates; to Contarini’s mind each of these duties was best performed through the verbal exchange of ideas. In his ongoing struggle to reach God by studying books, Contarini found relief in his friends: Because they embodied and transmitted a way of overcoming the bifurcation between rational and affective knowledge, they enabled Contarini to do the same. Contarini presented his exemplary friends as people who combined piety and knowledge, people who inspired him through their ability to sustain conversations that were both learned and loving. Thus, Contarini thanked Giustiniani for his letter “full of such affect, of such clarity,” in direct contrast to the restraints of mundane reason, “that it manifestly demonstrated the truth and confuted that frivolous reason which holds one back (and me more than all the others).” The fact that Giustiniani’s words rose above reason was, Contarini says, evidence of divine inspiration beyond Giustiniani’s own intelligence and training: “Although I had known your most affectionate spirit and your dexterity in writing your ideas, nevertheless I was not able to judge otherwise that not you but the spirit that is in you had dictated your hand.”80 Contarini acknowledged Giustiniani’s humanistic skill with written words even as he affirmed that the effectiveness of written words depended on the spirit that inspired them. Giustiniani, he insisted, reconciled affect and intellect: “Although I often think of this thing [about the highest good] which one reads in many philosophical and Christian authors, I see you relish it with such elevation of the intellect that when I am reading about

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it I, too, experience a little of this relish.”81 His relationship with Giustiniani enabled Contarini to read learned texts in a new light – to absorb and to be transformed by their knowledge. Thus Giustiniani’s words (whether written or spoken) conveyed the example that became the catalyst for Contarini’s own progress: “Your letter was received by me some days ago filled with that caritas which, overflowing in you, fills even all your works and all your words.”82 By infusing ideas with love, Giustiniani demonstrated to Contarini the transformative power of texts. At the same time, within the framework of a discursive friendship, Giustiniani provided Contarini with texts – letters – that spoke to the intellect and the affect alike. Contarini was thereby able to close the circle. These texts from Giustiniani were effective insofar as they could be made part of a conversation: “The things you sent to Vincentio have given me as much satisfaction and consolation as anything else I have read. And I wish I had had them by me or at least that they had remained in the city so that I would sometimes have been able to discuss those writings with you and excite my slumbering soul.”83 For Contarini, the affective power of texts was grounded in the dynamics of dialogue. Discussions with friends were so important to Contarini because they enabled him to infuse rational study with affective knowledge. Conversations worked on two levels: Even as the subject matter ranged from scholarly to spiritual topics, the act of conversing engendered an intimate, emotional relationship. Thus Contarini delighted not only in his exchanges with an exemplary religious figure such as Giustiniani, but also in his relationships with other scholars, such as his new friendship with a humanist and follower of Savonarola, Pier Francesco Galliano:84 “I have been thinking above all about the gentilissimo Galiano. . . . Every Saturday I am able to write him and to use an hour talking with him in that way that is allowed to me. In all the week I do not believe that I am able to spend an hour which pleases me as much as that one does.”85 Although here he suggests that he would prefer to speak in person, Contarini concedes that through letters (the means “allowed to me”) he is able to “talk” with his friends. Through these learned conversations Contarini’s friends were able to exchange their ideas in the context of an affective relationship, and the virtues they embodied could effectively influence him. The answer Contarini sought in philosophical and sacred texts he found instead in discussions about spiritual and academic topics with other learned men. Conversations not only bound friends together, but also reconciled rational and affective knowledge. To support the conviction that friends had spiritual obligations to one another, Contarini argued that the commandment to love your neighbor

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was an injunction to help your friends. For him this meant that Querini should not have joined the hermitage. Stephen Bowd has shown that there were “surprising affinities” between Contarini and Querini on the question of whether civic life had value, and Querini and Giustiniani’s attempts to reform the church from the monastery show that monasticism could be a “potent force for personal and institutional reform.”86 But for Contarini, broad questions about civic and institutional reform were vivified specifically by questions of friendship. Linking Aristotle’s argument that the human being is a social animal to Augustine’s teaching that we ought to help our neighbor both spiritually and materially, Contarini concluded that if Aristotle, “deprived of the light of caritas,” recognizes that friends ought to help one another in things pertaining to body and fortune (fortuna), then how much more ought Christians to realize that they have a duty to help one another gain the spiritual qualities “that are truly good and truly ours” (veramente son beni et veramente sonno nostri).87 The outlines of this argument about the value of the active life were developed over a century earlier by Coluccio Salutati, but Contarini put a distinctive spin on it by using this argument to admonish his friends that they had a duty to converse with one another – to be, in other words, both present and interactive. For example, he challenged Querini’s decision to join the hermitage by rebuking him for depriving his friends of his presence, which could benefit them greatly: “It is not the will of God, nor is it good for you to live in solitude, depriving your friends and many other people of that great benefit that they took from your conversation.”88 Here the call for his friend’s “conversation” could be construed as a call for presence, invoking the medieval emphasis on imitatio – the idea that when present his friend could then provide a living model for others to follow. For Contarini, though, presence also entailed the particular dynamics of friendly talks: “Leaving aside the others, I speak of myself. How many times do you think, my Vincentio, that when my mind was greatly disturbed, I came to you and spoke with you and that doing so brought my mind great relief and quiet from this disturbance? And how many times since you left do you think that I have had the same problem and have wanted to be able to come to you and still want to come to you?”89 Querini, Contarini insisted, was reneging on his duty to his friend because they were no longer able to converse – by which he meant both that they were no longer able to spend time together, and that they could not talk. Insofar as absence made it impossible to serve friends in person, Contarini insisted that letters were imperative precisely because they recreated discussions. Ideally, however, Contarini hoped that these would be personal discussions – in other words that Querini would in fact return: “May the will of Christ not be that you

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would serve him separate from our company, but that we would praise God in your conversation.”90 To live with friends and talk with friends was to enact devotion to God. Thus we have here an early example of a frustration that by the seventeenth century was solved by a strong emphasis on sincerity and the widespread assumption that letters should be purveyors of emotion. As Elizabeth Goldsmith puts it in her study of the “art of interaction” in seventeenthcentury France, this emphasis on emotional sincerity was in contrast “to earlier definitions of both written and spoken dialogue as an interlocking system of mutual obligation, wherein imitation was the principle of conduct enabling individuals to learn how to act.” Goldsmith explains that this change happened because the rising bourgeoisie in search of status viewed sincerity as a better strategy than imitation. As outsiders, they could use claims about their own emotional state to disturb the smooth facade of prevailing assumptions about acceptable social behavior.91 But with Contarini we see that a focus on emotion and sincerity had religious roots as well: The quest for spiritual immediacy intensified by social frustrations and alienation among upper-class men and women could lead to the same emphasis on immediacy in those relationships that were supposed to facilitate spiritual growth. Friends could, moreover, offer a distinctively religious version of the consolation that Renaissance intellectuals had come to value so highly. Petrarch, for example, insisted that the rhetor should be a doctor of souls, and in the generation before Contarini, Marsilio Ficino presented himself as a doctor of souls to Cosimo de Medici, and sought to synthesize the roles of moral philosopher and practical physician.92 The pious literati in the sixteenth century extended this claim as they sought to console one another and to be consoled in return, not just by eloquence but by distinctively spiritual teachings. Convinced that speech had the power of consolation, they wanted also a consolation that transcended eloquence. Thus More insists in The Last Things that his text was meant to lead people to thoughts about death – the only medicine that could cure them of their benighted attachments to the things of this world.93 Pole thanked Colonna for writing an eloquent letter that did more than words alone could do: “Because in these times there are so few things which I read or understand of others’ words which are able to delight or console me, I am all the more grateful for your letters that have consoled me as much as they delight me. Although indeed it is not your letters (as it is not, as I say truly, so much a tribute to them, although elegant and apt writings of consolation) which led me who was destitute of every human consolation and prostrate to better hope, but it was the Spirit who did it, who is spoken in those letters, who is the source of all true and solid consolation.”94 Pole’s parenthetical disclaimer underscores the paradox of extolling and dismissing the consoling power of

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words. He plays again with this paradox as he characterizes the purpose of his letter to Henry VIII. He begins by telling the king that he was tempted to present himself as a philosopher and doctor who could heal the king’s sick mind with well-crafted arguments, but he decided that he should instead think of himself as a grieving mother addressing a dead child, hoping for a miraculous cure rather than relying on his own medical knowledge.95 A physician’s skill, like eloquence, then becomes a symbol of misguided self-reliance. There are echoes here of the conflict between two types of healing that Peter Brown analyzed in his work on the cult of saints in Western Europe. In the early Middle Ages, as Brown explains, the physician with his herbal remedies offered portable, individualized cures – a do-it-yourself model – in contrast with healing saints, who helped petitioners only insofar as the petitioners were willing to enter into a close relationship defined by a vertical model of dependence.96 As Pole and his peers identified the difference between impotent speech and thought on the one hand and discourse that provided spiritual consolation on the other, they demarcated a realm of spiritual friends and religious community distinct from the instrumental calculations that elsewhere prevailed.

good speech and communal standards If the traditional Catholic notion of mediators and guides was enshrined in the cult of saints and in the medieval emphasis on imitation, then as sixteenthcentury Catholic intellectuals set themselves apart and sought to embody spiritual values, they developed slightly different versions of this model. As we will see in Chapter 5, these learned men and women valued exceptionalism – those who seemed in some way to stand out from the mundane – but their most valued relationships were with each other, and not with impoverished ascetics or mystical women. In this they were unlike the alumbrados who, as Michel de Certeau explains, were economically and culturally dispossessed intellectuals who sought spiritual guidance from poor and illiterate women.97 The distance between this phenomenon in Spain and the attitudes in our Religious Republic of Letters is exemplified by Thomas More’s awkward relationship with Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent. Barton was a visionary who had trances and voiced prophecies. She opposed Henry’s divorce; she even forced herself into the king’s presence to predict that if he married Anne Boleyn he would lose the throne within a month. Barton, along with her confessor and several others, eventually was hanged and quartered under a revised law of treason that was later used to convict More. In the months before Barton’s conviction, More had to defend himself against charges that he shared her

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views. It is all the more noteworthy, then, that More was fascinated by Barton and eventually met with her.98 He later wrote to Cromwell that he visited the Nun of Kent “not because I was curious about what God revealed to her but because of her virtue that I had heard for so many years and the hope that she would remember me to God.”99 Within two years More would write his daughters from prison, defending his own decision to face execution rather than accede to the opinion of many learned men. As we saw in Chapter 1 , he dedicated his translation of a book about an Italian philosopher to a nun. But even when he himself was labeled a political subversive, he did not cite Barton or any other visionaries as a source of religious knowledge. They could be models of virtue, and miracles could happen, but transformative knowledge came, he intimated, from pious, learned people – not uneducated mystics. Because pious people could be identified by their words, More repeatedly, and vehemently, condemned fellow intellectuals who betrayed themselves as unworthy by transgressing the standards of speech. In defending Erasmus and upholding humanism, More rails against the ignorance learned men conceal by “bellowing out their windy disapproval” (clamoribus ampullosis infremere). Theologians, he insists, must give up their exclusivist claims on the language of ideas, because words “are not technical terms on which these men can claim a monopoly, as it were, so that anyone wishing to use them must go and ask them for a loan.”100 Empty words and hoarded words are equally objectionable: In both cases words are being treated as instruments of professional identity or status rather than as transmitters of meaningful knowledge. Whether the topic is explicitly secular or religious, the emphasis remains on the nature of the exchange. The bluster of the professional theologian has its counterpart in the sterility of sermonic discourse, as More shows when he describes a dreadful dinner he endured at a monastery in the midst of a controversy about whether prayers to the Virgin Mary could guarantee salvation: Lo and behold, in walked a cadaverous and somber old friar, followed by a boy carrying books. We sat down, and the host, not wasting any time about it, instantly put the question. I myself said nothing. For I take not pleasure in getting involved in vexatious and pointless disputes. They finally asked me what I thought, and since they would not let me keep quiet I said what I thought, but in only a few careless words. Then the friar launched into a long, rehearsed speech, and he blurted out over that dinner enough verbiage for nearly two sermons. . . . After a lengthy exchange, all I finally achieved was that the friar was praised to the skies whereas I was laughed down as a fool.101

More was opposed equally to both the content and the form of the friar’s argument: In this anecdote he aligns the problem of focusing exclusively

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on miracles and ritual prayers with the inability to converse. More’s son-inlaw William Roper observed that at court More faced the opposite problem, because he was such a delightful talker that the king was reluctant to let him leave. Roper reported that More consequently toned down his act (“and so by little and little from his former accustomed mirth to disuse [that is, to disengage] himself”).102 But it was not only the dissimulation required at court that frustrated More. He was also exasperated by those who did not speak clearly and eloquently. The fact that learned and religious men often used words badly was inseparable from the fact that many of them worried more about currying favor than about pursuing knowledge. Forced to choose between no speech, careless speech, and meaningless eloquence, More ended by claiming the persona of the wise man who is wrongly judged a fool. Foolishness thus became a way to think about interactive speech that struck the right balance between emotion and learning. In More’s Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (ca. 1534), composed as an exchange between an uncle and nephew in Hungary who faced an impending invasion by Turks, the binary of “outward learning” or being “inwardly taught only by God” is replaced by dialogue. The nephew explains that he sought out his uncle knowing full well that human advisors are necessarily transient, but invaluable nevertheless: I now see the likelihood that when ye be gone we shall be sore destitute of any such other like, therefore thinketh me that God of duty bindeth me to sue to you now, good uncle, in this short time that we have you, that it may like you against these great storms of tribulations . . . I may learn of you such plenty of good counsel and comfort that I may, with the same laid up in remembrance, govern and stay the ship of our kindred, and keep it afloat from peril of spiritual drowning.103

The uncle, Antony, often claims to be a fool. More, as we have seen, made the same claim for himself during his debate with his daughter Margaret about the oath he would not sign.104 In both cases, self-described foolishness extends rather than forestalls reasonable dialogue. Similarly, in More’s work laughable figures of talkative women are used to illustrate the importance of interactive dialogue. These women make a brief appearance as Antony begins to describe the ideal conversations of learned men. The amusing vignettes about a chattering wife and an unlearned nun who talked so much that her scholarly brother could not get a word in edgewise seem designed to reinforce the idea that women should be excluded from these conversations. But Antony takes a different tack, and concludes by citing Aquinas’s observation that serious discussion alone makes the mind “dull and deadly,” whereas “proper pleasant talking” is a virtue that makes the mind “quick and lust to labor and study again.”105 These stories lighten the dialogue and sharpen the point that the ideal is not turgid intellectual discourse but

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lively conversation. For More and other learned evangelicals, this meant a model of conversation in which men were joined by women – not, admittedly, by wordy wives and uneducated nuns, but by learned women who could both leaven the discourse and uphold a high standard of speech. The female figures in Dialogue of Comfort are reminiscent of Erasmus’s famous Praise of Folly, where Folly is a woman who darts about from one argument to another and ends by provocatively reminding her hearers that they should not remember the words of a foolish woman.106 Rather than embodying the pithy Pauline paradox that “the wisdom of the world is foolishness in the eyes of God” (1 Cor 3:19), Folly voices the more ambiguous claim that transfiguration is hard to come by. Praise of Folly, as Michael Screech explains, celebrates the ecstasy of union – union with God and union with one’s companions. Erasmus wanted to show how a writer or exegete might inspire that metamorphosis. As he explained in his dedicatory letter to More, the idea for the work had come to him as his mind wandered between pleasant memories of his friends and thoughts about the subjects they had studied together. It grew, in other words, in the place where companionship and intellectual work overlapped. Erasmus’s project was not an alternative to learned discourse among friends, but an intervention in these conversations – an attempt to emphasize that they must be both enlivened by emotion and intent on spiritual transformation: “For anyone who loves intensely lives not in himself but in the object of his love, and the further he can move out of himself into his love, the happier he is.”107 This sort of self-transcendence, in other words, is attained in loving friendships and in an interior apprehension of Christ. But how? How can one cede possession of oneself and become possessed by another? For Erasmus, these questions occurred in relation to friendship no less than to spiritual transfiguration. As he writes in an exegesis of Psalm 38, When the gift of prophecy is given to a man who purely treats and dispenses the word of God, people listen to it with religious attention and reverence, not as the words of a man but as the words of God himself. . . . Sometimes the spirit of Christ can be seen to be present in the hearers. Some sigh; some burst into tears; the faces of some grow happy. In short you would say that they had all been transfigured.108

Michael Screech shows that by celebrating the ecstasy of transfiguration, Erasmus made himself vulnerable to accusations that he was reviving the heretical Montanist belief that select people could speak prophecies when they were in an ecstatic trance.109 But this debate – which contributed to Erasmus’s notoriety – diverts attention from the fact that his interest in ecstasy was

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relational: The joy attained by those who feel the presence of Christ is matched by the happiness one feels in the presence of a friend.

transformative possession Erasmus concludes Praise of Folly with the self-forgetful transcendence that overtook Paul, the apostles at the Transfiguration, and (he suggests) perhaps Folly herself in this whirling dervish of a text.110 This is how both More and Erasmus deployed the trope of Christian foolishness. The paradox gained force not from the message that fools confound worldly wisdom, but instead from the contrast within the world of good speakers and learned people between those who focus solely on intellectual arguments and those who listen with the heart and the mind and seek the author as well as his words. In other words, transformation was necessarily emotional, and emotional change happened in and through relationships – through the right kind of dialogue and the kind of reading that sought communion with the author rather than knowledge of the text. This meant that the longing to be possessed by God was in a sense inseparable from the desire to possess other people. Several recent studies argue that this preoccupation with possession reflected a new emphasis on private property. Thus Seth Lerer uses a 1516 letter from Guillaume Budé to Erasmus to show how print and the commodification of texts changed relationships between intellectuals. Although Erasmus and Budé did not know each other personally, Erasmus wrote a long letter praising Budé’s scholarship, and Budé wrote to claim Erasmus as a “dear friend of us all” – a communal rather than a personal relationship – because “your writings have made you such a public figure that no one can claim you as his private property.” Budé announces, moreover, that he belongs to Erasmus: “I cannot express, I repeat, how wholly you have made me yours since I had your letter.”111 Countless letters began as Budé’s did, using textual exchanges to claim possession. In a prefatory letter to his friend and editor Peter Gilles, Erasmus insisted that “minds can develop an even closer link, the greater the space that comes between them” if they use “pledges of this literary kind” (id huiusmodi pignoribus literariis) to repair the distance that physical separation creates.112 Similarly, More thanked Erasmus and Gilles for a picture of themselves they had made for him by noting that although the portrait conveyed their bodies, it was their “loving letters” that “should make their souls present.”113 As Seth Lerer, Lisa Jardine, and Lorna Hutson point out, these claims were about establishing a community that would itself model a new kind of intellectual identity and status. Yet these possessive claims were also, I argue,

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manifestations of the desire for a transformation as spiritual as it was social. Budé, for instance, explicitly linked possession with change. Erasmus, he claimed, had shaped him, fashioned him. This fundamental change affected Budé’s decisions about what to read (“I began to read Seneca, to please you”) and engendered scholarly confessions (“I am most grateful to you and admit it, for your forgiveness in that matter of [a mistranslated Greek word]. You gave me the most gentle treatment on that point, leaving me as you did to detect and amend my own error”).114 Kathy Eden’s work shows that these intellectuals were trying to participate in a shared tradition – to create unity out of multiplicity, to “hold all things in common” and thereby take possession of a tradition writ large – a tradition that included pagan as well as Christian scholars, the past as well as present.115 Eden points out that this claim was supported by the theological assumption that God had legal authority or auctoritas over all intellectual property. The intellectuals’ project had other religious implications as well, however. The common property that was greater than the sum of its parts is akin to what Screech calls ecstasy. Pious intellectuals invested in the notion of tradition that Eden describes, not because of a secular intellectual agenda, but because they sought transcendence. Spiritual transformation or conversion thus was an intersubjective act. Early in his life, Erasmus chose to join a monastery because (as he later emphasized) he was pressured to do so by unscrupulous guardians; he later presented nearly all the attempts to lure him into an order as laughably hypocritical or superstitious. The only tales he did not mock were those about monks who were able to speak for hours with Christ each day, or about Catherine of Siena spending her days walking, talking, and praying with Christ.116 The appeal of these images was heightened by the presence of his old friend Cornelis Gerard. In a house of Augustinian canons, Gerard seduced him with wonderful stories of how they might study together and thereby live in fellowship with the angels.117 While they were both still in orders, Erasmus and Gerard exchanged enthusiastic letters about their scholarship and their friendship. Echoing the older monk, Erasmus wrote: “Suffice it to say that my supreme desire is to join with you in a single bond of brotherhood, a single devotion to the literary pursuits we share, and lastly a single foundation of enduring affection.”118 By 1500, though, the relationship seems to have broken off entirely, and Erasmus gave an unflattering portrait of Gerard in later descriptions of his years in the monastery. Erasmus viewed his dissatisfaction with monasticism, in other words, through the lens of his disillusionment with Gerard. Just as his friend turned out to be ignorant and opportunistic – or so Erasmus later believed – so too was monasticism devoid of scholarship and enlightened conversation.119

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Erasmus’s life took a second (happier) turn when he began to focus on sacred letters – scriptural exegesis and biblical scholarship. This turn, as we have seen, is often linked closely with Erasmus’s relationship to the biblical scholar John Colet. When Colet lectured on the Pauline epistles at Oxford, he asked Erasmus to join him. Erasmus demurred, insisting that he was not yet equipped to teach on scripture. Yet he insisted also that he did not see himself as a professor of “what is called secular learning.”120 Moreover, his interest in studying Greek in order to read scripture and other early Christian sources in their original language dated from the time he spent in England – the same time he came to know Colet.121 Erasmus’s first published work of biblical exegesis in fact originated as a letter to Colet continuing a discussion they began while at a banquet together in Oxford, and the letters they exchanged about that interaction reveal that their friendship was constituted by these sorts of conversation. Only two letters between Erasmus and Colet survive that precede this event, both of which were written before the two men had met in person. Colet wrote first, as an elder, established scholar welcoming the humanist from the Low Countries to England based on a commendation from a mutual friend, on Erasmus’s reputation, and on the evidence afforded by his letters.122 Predictably, Erasmus’s response was filled with praise for Colet and a humble self-description; it culminated in a conditional pledge: “If you, Colet, can love a man of this sort, if you consider him worthy of your friendship, then pray stamp Erasmus as the most securely yours of all your possessions.”123 Possession was central to Erasmus’s vision of friendship and scholarship both – as Kathy Eden’s work demonstrates. Erasmus interpreted the adage that friends hold all things in common to mean that friends share knowledge – of pagan and Christian tradition alike – and that the sharing of knowledge was in fact the basis of friendship. In his exchange of letters with Colet we see, however, that the crucial issue was not just the sharing of tradition, but more specifically the right knowledge of Christ. Thus the next letters that survive plunge us into their dinner-party debate about how to interpret Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane before his death. Erasmus was compelled to continue the argument because, as he explained, “in the course of our sparring match yesterday afternoon, Colet, . . . I was not fully convinced by the soundness of your position.”124 Erasmus turned the letter that followed into a dialogue that he published – his first published work of scriptural exegesis – and thereby enacted the model of friendship he sought. He took issue not only with Colet’s failure to read the tradition of interpretation correctly, but also with Colet’s insistence that Christ did not shrink from death.125 By publishing the debate as a dialogue

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between himself and Colet, Erasmus presented to a limited community – the intellectuals who might read such a text – a model of how to use tradition, and also how to vivify contemporary relationships with exchanges about this shared tradition. The published text was known as the Disputatiuncula de taedio, pavor, tristicia Iesu (1501 –2). The diminutive suffix in the first word softens the reference to dispute so that we might, as John Gleason plausibly suggests, translate the title as “A Dispute among Friends.”126 This dialogue was in an important sense a counterpart to Erasmus’s earlier work on scholarship – Antibarbari (1489– 95), a defense of classical scholarship that Gerard had asked him to write.127 Erasmus originally wrote Antibarbari as a speech given by Gerard, but he became frustrated with his friend (who, according to Erasmus, let his duties as a monastic administrator hinder his devotion to scholarship); he then changed the text into a dialogue between himself, a fellow monk, and three laymen. The decisive defense of learning now was voiced not by someone in a religious order, but by Jacob Batt, a town clerk. Some ten years later, in the “Dispute Among Friends,” Erasmus had left Gerard and an institutional retreat behind and entered into the uncharted territory of non-institutionalized pious scholarship. His relationship with Colet thereby becomes the context for exploring the values and dynamics of this new community. John O’Malley notes that it seems “ironic that here [Erasmus] turns his skill against Colet, the person generally credited with successfully urging him to give his talents a more theological direction.” As is so often the case, however, what seems ironic is actually a phenomenon that requires explanation. Erasmus challenged Colet precisely because their relationship led Erasmus into an interactive engagement with scriptural theology. Erasmus transformed their verbal exchange into a written text that was supposed to transmit the right tradition – the right community of intellectuals through time – into a compelling vision of Christ. The text was literally unthinkable, however, without the relationship between Erasmus and Colet. If Erasmus, the master wordsmith, reveals that relationships shaped the form and content of his textual scholarship, Contarini provides a dramatic example of how this dialectic might lead people to prioritize relationships over written words. During the years when Contarini was a private scholar, he suffered through a religious crisis much like Luther’s. Contarini had long worried that it was impossible to be good enough to merit salvation, and this worry turned into a paralyzing anxiety when he realized that his friend Giustiniani shared the same fears. If Giustiniani (an ascetic hermit who had left behind family and friends to devote himself to Christ) could not trust in God’s approval, then how could anyone? Like Luther, Contarini consoled

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himself with the conviction that Christ’s passion “remains more than sufficient for the satisfaction of past sins and those into which human frailty falls.”128 Unlike the famous reformer, though, Contarini came to this conviction through a conversation rather than meditation on a biblical passage. Unhappy and uncertain, he went to confession and was consoled there by a long discussion with a monk: “I spoke for a good while with a monk full of sanctity. He spoke of many things but, almost as if he knew my anxiety, he began to argue that the way to health is wider than that which many people believe. And he said many things to me although he did not know who I was.”129 Here the confessional that so tormented Luther became the site of reassurance, and interactive dialogue replaced the climactic moment in classic conversion accounts by Augustine and Petrarch. When Augustine, the accomplished rhetorician and aspiring scholar was seeking conversion to a life of celibacy and singleminded devotion to God, he heard a voice that said take and read (tolle et legere). He picked up a Bible from a nearby table and opened it at random to read a verse that inspired him to dedicate himself to a religious life. Nearly a thousand years later, Petrarch saw himself at a similar moment of decision on the summit of Mt. Ventoux. He picked up Augustine’s Confessions and found there an ambiguous message that did not lead to a decisive conversion. Contarini’s ambivalence about reading scripture and other texts extends this trajectory: He did not relish, as Petrarch did, the way that textual conversations, with authors dead and alive, could mitigate the moments of textual failures. The conversation that catalyzed his spiritual conversion thus is revealing because it is of a piece with his claim that his spiritual progress was possible only in the context of relationships – emotional, textual, and conversational relationships – with living friends.130 If the palpable frustration with physical absence pervasive in Contarini is not so keen in the writings of other pious literati, they nevertheless share his impulse to enact desire for God through relationships with each other. Social changes and ambivalence about the economy of reciprocity compelled the literati to privilege their friendships and invest these relationships with spiritual meaning. Within the community, changing assumptions about reading and writing complicated the traditional assumption that the sacred could be discerned through textual meditation. Thus the desire for God was inextricable from the desire for other people – not just in books, but also in person – and relationships became a locus of salvation.

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5

Defining the Ideal: Words of Praise for Fools and Bishops, Women and Martyrs

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n admirer once wrote that vittoria colonna’s way of speaking was “so compelling that it seems almost as if her words are like chains, captivating her listeners.”1 The poet Bernardo Tasso claimed that she had “attained the highest degree of perfection in every art and science, far surpassing Sappho and all others who are most famous in good literature.” He dedicated his own book to her because her accomplishments gave her wings to “soar above the stars” and rays that “illuminated this our age.” He hoped that this radiant power would clear away the imperfections of his own work.2 In similarly exalted terms, Margaret More Roper’s letters were hailed as marvelous by Reginald Pole and others. Erasmus deemed Roper one of the “glories” of her generation, remarkable for her learning and virtue and the model for an exemplary way of life.3 As these examples illustrate, in a culture rife with misogyny, accomplished and privileged women like Colonna and Roper were lavished with praise. And why not? Praise was part of the elite culture’s gift economy, and it was effusive for the same reasons that gifts were excessive: Unlike currency or contracts, these hyperbolic offerings obliged the recipient in ways that were inescapable precisely because they were unquantifiable.4 Upper-class persons schooled in rhetoric used praise to create allegiances, flatter patrons, and make friends. Women who could trade in social power were part of this system. Even though there were virulent critiques of women who appeared to look beyond the home or cloister by studying nonreligious books, men who had something to gain often ignored these strictures and glorified women who had money and clout. From this perspective, praise for Colonna and Roper looks like a relatively straightforward effort to gain money or cultural capital. Praise for exceptional women was not just a gift, however. It was also a speech act intended to express ideas and inspire emotional responses. Technically speaking, rhetoricians viewed praise along with blame as part of a 146

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genre known as demonstrative or epideictic rhetoric. Renaissance humanists composed heroic epics, sermons, and encomia for classical and contemporary heroes with a moralizing zeal, convinced that their eloquent descriptions of virtue and vice could inspire listeners to emulate the morality and prudence they extolled.5 The rhetoric of praise thus had a practical goal, but it was an amorphous kind of practicality. Unlike judicial or deliberative rhetoric, designed to persuade people in a courtroom or political assembly to choose a specific course of action, demonstrative rhetoric was designed to excite people and make a speaker’s ideas emotionally as well as intellectually compelling.6 In this sense, it was less practical than metaphysical, and as a style of speech that was effusively eloquent, demonstrative rhetoric was easily linked to sacred excess. The Catholic mass traditionally was referred to as a sacrifice of praise. Biblical psalms were known as songs of praise. In the fourteenth century Petrarch linked his neoplatonic ideal with praise by punning on the connection between Laura, his idealized beloved’s name, and laudare, the Latin verb for praise.7 Unlike demonstrative rhetoric, praise in these contexts did not just extol specific human virtues or describe imitable models, but also cast these up against the screen of transcendence using exaggerated language of gratitude and admiration that connected humanity and divinity. Thus the rhetoric of praise had both a horizontal (ethical) and vertical (religious) dimension. In what follows, I argue that highly educated Catholics who were interested in religious reform located themselves in relation to both dimensions by praising people who stood astride the boundaries of their community: fools, bishops, martyrs, and women.8 People in these categories embodied the possibility of holy alterity: Saintly women and holy fools testified to God’s willingness to speak through the lowly; bishops were God’s shepherds on earth; and martyrs were singularly dramatic witnesses to salvific selflessness. Even as the spectre of holiness hovered about them like a magnetic force, people from these categories were praised by pious literati as exemplars of learned rectitude – in other words, in terms that collapsed the alterity into similitude. Devout lay scholars who lauded people who were otherwise not like them for having virtues they admired in themselves thereby ensured that their community was infused with an aura of holiness. Their effusive encomia are akin to what Eleanor Kaufman, analyzing a different community, calls “delirious praise.” Kaufman argues that modern French philosophers (including Bataille and Foucault) praised one another with immoderate extravagance in order to efface divisions between individual and collective subjectivity. They did so, she explains, because they were troubled by modern, individualistic culture. By challenging conventional academic norms of rational judgment and measured critique, their hyperbolic

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exchanges enabled them to create a spiritualized community.9 Individualism was not the problem for our sixteenth-century protagonists; they were instead disturbed by the sense that the world they lived in did not satisfy their desire for meaning. As we have seen throughout this book, they were ambivalent about their role in the economy of reciprocity, and in search of a new model of spiritual scholarship. Consequently, they used praise to define the life to which they aspired – a life of spiritualized scholarship pursued with and through friends. Of course, in varied ways they all affirmed traditional symbols of the ideal religious life such as saints, monasticism, and sacramental devotions – but not entirely, and not exclusively. They wanted also to sacralize their work of reading and writing and their community of fellow readers and writers. One way they did this was by upholding the illustrative, memorable aspects of figures traditionally associated with holiness while re-imagining these figures in their own image. This merger of the scholarly and the sacred might well be interpreted as a dialectic pairing of medieval and modern forms of Christianity, with the implicit teleological claim that the sacred was a chrysalis that scholars eventually shed as they came into their own as paragons of a “this-worldly” identity. This is the organizing logic for Jürgen Habermas, Dena Goodman, Anne Goldgar, Lisa Jardine, Peter Miller, and others who are interested in how the Republic of Letters engendered the modern scholar.10 This kind of interpretation prevents us from understanding fully what praise meant for Catholic scholars, however. Instead of tamping down or weeding out the sacred, they were intent on cultivating it, especially amongst themselves, and one way they found to define their way of life and their community as being religious was by lauding people who embodied religious exceptionalism as exemplars of moderate scholarly virtue.

learned martyrs Martyrs, of course, were the most dramatic imitators of Christ; for some elite Catholic reformers, though, martyrs were sanctified not just by their suffering but also by their learning. As we saw in Chapter 2, Reginald Pole repeatedly emphasized the status of More and Fisher as learned men. He also held them up as sources for an alternative epistemology – the epistemology of faith. “The truth,” Pole wrote, “shines in them in some way different from that in which it shines for those who use only the light of reason.”11 Like Colonna and More, Pole used the tradition of meditating on the crucifixion to describe how this knowledge has its origin in Christ: “Who can contemplate Him hanging on the cross . . . without perceiving from this contemplation – more surely than could

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be perceived from all written books – the fact that the path of our salvation is not that which the error of man imagines?”12 To the conviction that the book of Christ is superior to any human book, Pole adds that the blood of apostles and martyrs, like the blood of Christ, provides the ink with which this book is written: “Whatever contains the doctrine of Christ was written in their blood flowing from the wounds of Christ. They were living books in which learned and ignorant, wise and foolish, and finally all mankind might read what was the will of God, what was the path to happiness.” As books written in blood, the martyrs replace human writings: “Through these men the Church can know more about the will of God than through any books written by hand.”13 Here we have the same claim to direct access that motivated Colonna’s description of the book of the Cross. This has implications for the truth claims of Scripture. On the one hand, the martyr books are the same as Scripture, for as Pole says, “These things written on paper were dictated by the same spirit, for without doubt the written memorials of the Evangelists and the Apostles that we have written in the New Testament were inspired by the Spirit of God.” On the other hand, exegetical claims are trumped by the acts of martyrs: Nevertheless, as the original always has greater authority than all other things that are then described in books, so also these books written in the blood of martyrs are to be preferred to all others. These were the original books in which the finger of God appeared. The hand of man appears in all others that were written with ink on paper. Although the hand of man followed the hand of God and could not err, nevertheless it has less dignity and is subject to more accidents. The books can be distorted by the perverse reasoning and interpretation of men and can be imagined in many forms.14

Brad Gregory interprets this as a “stunning passage” because of its claim that martyrs took priority even over the Bible. This was, he explains, a distinctive way to interpret martyrdom. Whereas the Protestants proclaimed that martyrdom occurred because of the rediscovery of the Gospel, and the Anabaptists hailed martyrdom as a mark of Christ’s true church, Pole – a Catholic – suggested that martyrdom was a teaching tool: God used martyrdom to make Christians understand the divine will.15 Pole’s epistemology, however, in fact does not unfurl smoothly from this central pole of martyrdom. He lauds the universality and certainty that come with an epistemology of faith, but chooses at every turn to buttress this with claims about how More and Fisher were divine conduits because of their human, scholarly excellence. For Pole it is crucial that their beliefs were validated by their intellectual achievements, and that these achievements were

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affirmed by scholarly consensus: “The opinion of More and Fisher, the most learned men this Island has ever produced these many centuries, is an opinion approved for many ages by the common agreement of greatly learned men.”16 The community of scholars offers a reliable guide to truth – a claim Pole upholds even when he discusses how theologians in Paris supported Henry’s divorce: “This question would not ever stand firmly by any general agreement of a learned, philosophical gathering, unless royal threats were found to be of greater influence than prayers usually are over the minds of so many men.”17 Crass calculations often prevail, but they do not in themselves negate the importance of learned knowledge. In his diatribe against Henry’s defender Sampson, in fact, Pole rails against intellectuals, with their sophistry and vain logic, but he is equally interested in defending them, by showing that Sampson is a wretched scholar: “But surely the writings of Sampson and his followers exhibit neither erudition nor eloquence. They rather exhibit the greatest nonsense, incredible ignorance not only of the liberal arts, but also of the sacred writings. Yet these men purport to glory in supporting these arts alone.”18 Pole is inspired to bitter vehemence by Sampson’s critique of Erasmus: “He wrote more books than you have ever read. . . . If your name were to be compared with Erasmus in the realm of learning, yours would be most obscure.”19 Status, Pole insists, is equated with the intertwined traits of intellectual acumen, scholarship, and religious virtue: “In the young men you now recognize, there is neither evidence of any virtue or learning nor, indeed, [is there] any sign of divine favor.”20 In fact, the most remarkable thing about Pole’s treatment of martyrs is not that he saw martyrdom as the preeminent form of pedagogy, but rather his pervasive emphasis on learning rather than suffering as a privileged source of knowledge. His attack on Henry is, in one sense, an unresolved attempt to clarify how truth is known. The suffering and deaths of the martyrs in themselves were important. Thomas Starkey wrote that Pole was deeply affected by the “shedding of the [martyrs’] blood,” and Pole himself wrote that the cruelty of the execution left him speechless for nearly a month. Equally telling, though, is Starkey’s point that Pole pondered not only the executions but also “a consent of doctors agreeing to the same” as he made up his mind to oppose Henry. Excessive suffering in the name of God is a site of holy knowledge, but it is not an exclusive site. Twenty years later when, as Archbishop of Canterbury, Pole recalled More’s martyrdom in a speech to Londoners, he again chose not to make faithful suffering his singular point of departure: “Was there any other thing of that force, of that virtue, able to make him to overcome the natural love, than a love and charity surpassing nature? Was not this a great miracle?” A miracle, Pole

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stresses, that More achieved through his own “natural light” by “reasoning in this matter . . . with a friend of his.” Their conversations and discussions enabled More to reach the conclusions that would lead to his death. Firm in these convictions, he was helped finally “by the light supernaturall, and by a supernaturall love.” Thus Pole emphasized that the choices that would lead More to holiness were cultivated and informed not by biblical meditation but by friendship and conversation.21 In this case Pole spoke as the head of the newly restored Catholic church in England, offering More as an exemplary figure in order to inspire similar faithfulness in his Catholic audience who had lived for twenty years under Protestant rulers. He spoke at a time when More and Henry’s other victims were being firmly installed after decades of relative neglect alongside other martyrs in the Catholic imagination.22 Nevertheless, instead of emphasizing the redemptive nature of suffering in itself, he retained the same dynamic of interweaving praise for an exemplary death with encomia for More’s pious learning.

laudable fools Recall the Holbein sketch of the More family discussed in Chapter 4. As we saw there, More and his daughter Margaret look up and out, away from the family. Only one other figure in the picture looks away from the family: More’s fool, Henry Patenson. But where father and daughter look to the side, Henry meets the viewer’s gaze. The fool is thus portrayed as a figure who embodies the immediacy of experience, unhindered by intellectual knowledge or social graces and devoid of the desire that More and Roper convey to lose themselves in thought. The idea of the holy fool in Christianity (which particularly in Eastern Christian traditions garnered sanctity from the literal rejection of conventional behavior) here appears as a less extreme figure: a simple-minded, unlettered person, distinguished not by bizarrely foolish behavior but by a lack of education.23 This figure of a fool lurks also in the shadows of More’s prison cell: Antony, the main character in his prison work, Dialogue of Comfort, was a self-professed fool, and Margaret Roper evokes Patenson in her letter to her sister, Alice Alington, about their father’s decision not to sign the oath. After conceding that More was impervious to the arguments of learned men, Roper concludes by echoing what she describes as Patenson’s simple expression of disbelief: “And so I can in good faith go now no farther either, after so many wise men whom ye take for no example, except to say like M. Harry, Why should you refuse to swear, Father? For I have sworn myself.”24 This invocation of the fool triangulates the argument between Roper and her father, much as

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the fool creates a kind of visual triangle in the Holbein sketch, but the effect of the triangulation is ambiguous. By invoking the fool to support her own pragmatic position, Roper underscores that More stands alone in the position opposed by “so many wise men” – a position that appears then both foolish and admirable. Margaret Roper’s letter also recounts More’s frustratingly playful interpretation of a fable that Thomas Audeley, the Lord Chancellor, used to illustrate More’s obstinance and explain why he would not intercede on More’s behalf. The fable’s point was that wise men stay out of the rain only to feel themselves cut off from the rest of society – the fools who are all being drenched. In his self-mocking response, More rejects both options – isolated wisdom and communal foolishness – and with them any claim to a coherent definition of folly, even as he claims the identity of fool for himself: How beit daughter Roper, whom my Lord taketh here for the wise men and whom he counts as fools, I cannot very well guess, I cannot well read such riddles. For as Davus said in Terence, Non sum Oedipus, I may say you equally well, Non sum Oedipus, sed Morus, and what this name of mine signifies in Greek, I need not tell you. But I trust my Lord reckons me among the fools, and so reckon I myself, as my name is in Greek. And I find, I thank God, causes not a few, wherefore I so should in very deed.25

The fool was praiseworthy. This was, of course, the force of the Pauline teaching about the folly of the cross (that the act of divine redemption looks foolish from a worldly perspective) and the explicit message of Erasmus’s title, Encomium moriae (The Praise of Folly). In our context, praise for the fool, however, derived its peculiar significance from the way it was combined with condemnations of foolishness. More’s interpretation of the fable is hard to follow because he both condemns and applauds foolishness; even as he seeks to be judged a fool in God’s name, he does not offer a pithy contrast between conventional knowledge and religious truth. Erasmus similarly hovers between rejecting and praising folly as he explains More’s role in the genesis of his work: “First of all, there was your family name of More, which is as close to the Greek word for folly as you are far from the meaning of the word.”26 Foolishness is claimed at the same time that it is kept at bay. This is a distinctively ambiguous approach to praising foolishness, in contrast to the valorization of foolishness in two well-known works of theology from the fifteenth century. Thomas Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (which was one of the most widely distributed devotional manuals in sixteenth-century Europe) endorsed a simple Christianity and directed Christians to imitate Christ’s foolishness; and an influential work of theology by the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa provided a philosophical defense of ignorance (De docta

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ignorantia, 1440). Not coincidentally, both authors were schooled by the Brethren of the Common Life, the same group that ran the school in Deventer that Erasmus attended before he entered an order, and their descriptions of holy simplicity and learned ignorance seem, like Erasmus’s wise fool, to be inspired by the Brethren’s teaching of a philosophy of Christ. For Erasmus as for More, however, foolishness was both an extreme that could conduct holy power and a reprehensible lack of the kind of knowledge that bound them to the people they valued. Thus Erasmus notes that one of More’s great qualities was his ability to enjoy ignorant and learned people alike: “There is nothing in human life to which he cannot look for entertainment. . . . If he has to do with educated and intelligent people, he enjoys their gifts; if they are ignorant and stupid, he is amused by their absurdity.” Here the claim is not that ignorant people have a special kind of knowledge but that More is extraordinary because of his insightful adaptability. The connection between foolishness and ignorance was often underscored in this way, and when More explains that the inhabitants of Utopia were fond of fools, he judged it in terms of pleasure rather than special insight: There is no prohibition against enjoying their foolishness, and they even regard this as beneficial to the fools. If anyone is so solemn and severe that the foolish behaviors and comic patter of a clown do not amuse him, they don’t entrust him with the care of such a person, for fear that one who gets not only no use from a fool but not even any amusement – a fool’s only gift – will not treat him kindly.27

More would attribute other gifts to a fool, but that would be counterbalanced always by the sense that foolishness might be just that. Erasmus’s most famous description of hidden wisdom appears in his adage, Sileni Alcibiades. The message of this classical figure is that valuable things are often wrapped in unattractive packages. Christ then is like other truths that cannot be recognized by those who rely solely on appearances. But even as Erasmus praises Christ as the simple source of truth that confounds those who presume to know what they see, his ire is directed at fools – the “stupid multitude” – who judge so badly. He does not grant that the world has stable (albeit misbegotten) values in order to celebrate the wisdom that comes from confounding them; instead, Erasmus charges that there is no stability in conventional assumptions, for the “judgment of the multitude is topsy turvy.”28 This opens up space for him to present the hidden truth as powerfully paradoxical, but also true and right in a straightforward sense. This equivocal attitude toward religious extremes demonstrates why it is misleading to describe the learned Catholics in this study as committed to a moderate, reasonable, interiorized spirituality. Pious intellectuals were

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attracted to traditional forms of religious charisma and compelled by the power of a spirituality that was wholly other – the spirituality of oracles, mystics, visionaries, and fools. Figures like these were present in the lives of each of our characters. So in this vein Reginald Pole described himself as enthralled by a monk, Marco da Cremona, who preached on Pauline epistles in Padua and understood, Pole insisted, things “hidden from the wise and prudent.” Pole wrote to friends that studying the Bible with Marco made him feel as if he were in Paradise.29 Pole himself was described in similarly spiritualized terms by Colonna, and a contemporary later observed that Colonna viewed Pole as an oracle. As we have seen, Contarini invested Giustiniani with a similar power when he insisted that letters helped him because they were spiritually inspired. In each case, even as our pious literati praised a spiritualized power that channeled the divine without the trappings of conventional knowledge or status, they pulled these signifiers of holiness into the orbit of the less dramatic balance between spirituality and scholarship that they themselves sought to achieve.

ideal bishops: between heaven and earth Reform-minded intellectuals in the Renaissance usually employed praise with an eye toward creating a better society. Hagiographers praised saints, poets lauded heroes from antiquity, and preachers vividly recounted God’s great deeds. When our pious men and women of letters described praiseworthy people, though, they often seemed less interested in promoting a universal reform of Christianity than in locating themselves in relation to God and each other. This interest in the values of a relatively select community is apparent in Gasparo Contarini’s treatise about the ideal bishop – a work that pairs straightforward advice about pastoral duties with a nuanced treatment of selfformation and relationships between learned men. The bishop, according to Contarini, “stands between the divine spirits and the human race.” The treatise allows us to follow Contarini’s attempt to locate this place – to figure out, in other words, how a person might “participate in angelic as well as human nature.”30 The answer involved combining traditional forms of sanctity with directives on how and what to study. The virtues of saintliness Contarini extolls are exemplified by Pietro Barozzi, Bishop of Padua, a man “who never can be praised enough.” Barozzi celebrates mass daily “with great sanctity and a soul intent on God.” Through this frequent offering and reception of the sacrament, Contarini explains, a bishop ensures that he is “open in every way to divine illumination” (divinae illustrationi). Moreover, Barozzi practiced the

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virtue of Christian love or caritas by making sure that sick members of his household were cared for by a doctor.31 Contarini offers these details about Barozzi’s daily life in order to explain what it means to have a share of “angelic nature.” Although none of these examples match the extraordinary virtues or extreme acts typically recounted in early and medieval Christian hagiographies, Contarini finds them compelling because they are recognizably holy and yet also compatible with a scholar’s life. In describing Barozzi, Contarini thus locates sanctity within the bounds of a studious life. This location is defined literally, by the walls of a scholar’s house (the bishop cares for the sick in his own home, not anonymous needy people elsewhere in the city). Metaphorically, it is defined by the limits of human nature (Contarini specifically emphasizes that scholarship and contemplation should be tempered to human capacity). Rather than undertaking something that disposition or nature makes difficult, the exemplary bishop should devote himself to Scripture or works of scholarship about sacred texts. The divine offices should be recited daily; ideally this recitation will culminate in mystical contemplation. There are problems with both, however, because it is almost impossible to recite the offices without the mind becoming dull or distracted, and contemplation is limited by the mind’s inability to know divine secrets. Contarini thereby emphasizes that the quest for knowledge that is remote from human capacity often engenders weariness and disgust. Consequently, he insists that no one should “work against his will or in a way that seems opposed to his nature.” He even suggests that when daily prayers are onerous and contemplation unattainable, one should concentrate on studies (studia) instead.32 In this way, Contarini presents Barozzi as one who merges the realms of liturgical prayer and mystical contemplation with reading and intellectual thought, and suggests that both share something with the angels. On the one hand, the studies Contarini advocates fit into a monastic model. He lauds the bishops who listen to spiritual reading (divina lectio) even as they eat, and he advises those who are unable to pray to read Scripture or something pertaining to sacred literature.33 He insists that there is no deadlier disease than heresy, and fears that licentious poets corrupt the minds of young students. Echoing a standard lament, he notes that it is “entirely scandalous” that many know about Roman history and sacred rites but remain “completely ignorant” of the Christian religion.”34 His answer is to accustom students to Christian reading from infancy. On the other hand, Contarini has an expansive notion of what studies should entail, and he focuses on relationships and disposition rather than a monastic technique of studying. Although he condemns magic, astrology, and certain kinds of scholastic philosophizing, he invokes Plato, Aristotle,

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and classical literature throughout the treatise. Poets are dangerous, as the “divine” Plato recognized, but Contarini hastens to add that no one should suspect that he fails to see the “divine breath” in poetry or condemns all poetry. Contarini affirms that several Latin authors, such as Virgil and Orazio, can be profitably included in a curriculum that should focus on Christian studies.35 Although he directs readers to concentrate on Scripture and related works, he does not emphasize that the act of reading Scripture is conducive to contemplation or that the contents of Scripture are uniquely efficacious. Instead, he underscores the importance of the company one keeps. The bishop should be with “erudite and upright men” whose conversation would be uplifting and edifying. The emphasis here is on intent rather than content, and without further comment Contarini observes that their talk should range from Christian topics to things that pertain to “morals” and the study of letters.36 Conversations are uniquely valuable because friends are like “living books” (ex vivis libris), and it often happens that what we learn from them “cleaves to the soul better than what we learn from reading books.”37 In this sense friends (as living books) replace Christ, who was often described as a living book.38 Piety and secular scholarship can be smoothly integrated in the context of conversations among like-minded friends. Thus the emphasis on how conversation bridges the gap between the intellect and the affect that we saw in Chapter 4 infuses also Contarini’s rhetoric of praise. Describing a recently deceased friend who was wonderfully learned and pious, Contarini presents him not as a model but as a catalyst for Contarini’s own progress in knowledge and virtue. Each element of the description is punctuated with a reference to his friend’s great learning: “What can I say about him in words? About his practical knowledge of the sciences? He was most skillful in languages; and he died while studying, which he did up to the last day of his life.” Learning – study of the bonae artes – was inseparable from virtue and even from all activity, “so with his death all good studies, civil business, private business, all this has ceased for me.” Contarini insists that his friend had remained impervious to the allures of honors and ambition because every aspect of his life was directed to the intense study of divine things.39 This praiseworthy embodiment of learned piety is thus described in much the same terms Contarini uses to describe the ideal bishop. Just as he wants to locate the bishop between earthly and heavenly realms, Contarini wants also to show how his friend had detached himself from worldly standards through his commitment to piety. In both cases, however, there is a sense that this liminality is not defined by dichotomies – between Christian and pagan scholarship, between prayer and study, or between learning and piety – but

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is instead produced through relationships. Our attention to what Contarini praises can highlight the locative power of praise: It identified those who might inspire change and the qualities to which one should aspire, and it located both within a community that was religious in the sense that it was set apart from regular society and committed to values that differed from conventional social norms. What set this community apart? At one level the answer was simple: piety. As Contarini explains, his friend had been able to study vernacular works that others mocked because he esteemed all studies as piety, directed to the “highest things of God.”40 Framed in these terms, the claim to piety opposes convention and invokes a different set of standards. Harry Berger supplies a clear example of this in his reading of a famous book of manners, Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1552–1555). This book identified Galateo as a member of a bishop’s household and described him as learned, pleasant, handsome, and a good conversationalist besides. He enters the story as a prudent courtier who gracefully handles the task of giving a gift from the bishop to a visiting lord. The gift is in fact embarrassingly frank advice about table manners: “You are the most graceful and well-mannered gentleman . . . except for an unseemly motion you make with your lips and mouth at the dinner table, when your chewing makes a strange sound which is very unpleasant to hear.” The lord’s blushing acceptance of this advice is a vivid example of how all involved assumed the importance of self-presentation. But if we compare Della Casa’s literary profile of Galateo with a contemporary letter he wrote describing Galeazzo Florimonte, the historical figure who inspired the work, the scene reveals something also about how people might have distinguished the world of courtiers from the world of piety.41 Galeazzo Florimonte, who is now bishop of Sessa, is a man adorned not only with every genteel manner, but above all with a chaste and irreproachable manner of living, and he is also very fervent in his religious practices and piety. He is more shrewd and open than anyone else in noticing and reproving his friends’ faults, and sometimes he is even a critic who is not quite restrained.42

As Berger points out, this letter shows that the book that bore Galeazzo’s name (in its Latinized version, Galateo) demoted Galeazzo from the bishop that he actually was to a member of a bishop’s household. Further, the book’s description of him as a courtier did not include references to what the letter characterizes as his “very fervent” religious practices and piety. The pious historical Galeazzo does not have the same restraint that characterizes the exemplary literary courtier Galateo. Although in both roles he appears as someone who wants to correct others, the bishop is motivated not by genteel

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courtesy but by zeal.43 This contrast between Galateo the courtier and Galeazzo the zealous bishop thus suggests that piety not only differentiated spheres, but also connoted extreme behaviors and values that had to be moderated when one entered conventional society. Contarini had his eye trained on this link between extremes and spiritual exemplarity as he described admirable men. He presented their pious behaviors as extraordinary departures from convention: daily mass, spiritual reading throughout meals, loving care for all members of a household regardless of rank, ceaseless study in the face of death, and willingness to read texts that worldly scholars consider laughable. As della Casa’s implicit disapproval of Galeazzo’s zeal suggests, these behaviors, which were standard in monasticism, could seem excessive in a lay context. Although Contarini was convinced that extremes signified holiness, he was equally convinced that holiness was not only a matter of extremes. The men he admired were praiseworthy in more mundane ways, because of their education, reading, conversation, and friendships. Thus he simultaneously upheld and undermined the excess associated with holiness as he plotted a place for himself and his friends on a map that encompassed both the sacred and the profane.

praising women Strong, learned women figure prominently in a variety of Renaissance genres – from tragedies and comedies to humanist treatises about the family – but scholars have interpreted their presence as a symptom of anxiety about how social changes affect masculine identity rather than as signifiers of a spiritual quest.44 Particularly subtle interpretations range from Barbara Correll’s argument that humanists (pressured by the conflict between hereditary and bourgeois forms of power) delineated a new model of cultural manhood by discussing women’s virtues and re-imagining women’s (natural) subordination, to Lorna Hutson’s thesis that humanists proved that rhetorical acumen was a source of masculine prowess by rhetorically “husbanding” or controlling fictional women in their works of literature – and, in the process, managed to align masculinity with speech and affect rather than with brute strength.45 Elite men did not react to social pressures only by trying to shore up status or masculinity, though; instead, as we’ve seen throughout this work, they also responded to their ambivalence about political centralization and professionalization by trying to create an alternative community defined by a common spiritual quest. For these sorts of men, women were in a productively ambiguous relationship to spirituality. The assumption that women had inferior minds and were more passionate and more susceptible to sin could be

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supplemented with the corollary belief that precisely because women were not naturally intellectual, they were more spiritual.46 This is the trope that devout intellectuals drew on when they praised pious women: Lauding women such as Colonna and Roper enabled men to paint their scholarly work with the hue of feminine spirituality. Although the enthusiasm for women was motivated by gendered assumptions, praise for educated women was androgynous, and the ideal ungendered.47 Instead of lauding mystics or illiterate spiritual women, many learned men singled out women who were intellectually accomplished and active participants in a circle of erudite Christians.48 Devout lay men and women pursued salvation alongside one another as part of a virtual community, rather than as inhabitants of physically defined spaces such as monasteries or convents. Like many spiritual seekers before them, devout, accomplished women of the sixteenth century were not inclined to view the female as a marked category – and neither were their male peers. The men did not define themselves against women by emphasizing sexual self-control or resistance to lust, but instead prioritized a quest for meaning through the right kind of relationships with each other and with God.49 Pious intellectuals thus did not promote the notion that women were spiritual to the exclusion of the notion that women were learned. On the one hand, their encomia for notable women garnered force from the widespread assumption that women could embody religious charisma precisely because of their natural inferiority; yet on the other hand, by praising accomplished women writers and scholars, men and women alike identified themselves with a model of educated piety that was ungendered.50 For early humanist scholars who were not preoccupied with spirituality, by contrast, the exceptionalism of educated women simply testified to scholarly achievement. For instance, in a generation preceding Colonna’s, Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558) was a renowned female humanist. She spoke publicly at the University of Padua, before the Venetian Doge, and was invited to join Queen Isabella’s court of Aragon. A leading humanist in Florence wrote in 1491 that Fedele’s presence proved that their age was on par with the best of Greek and Roman culture. Because Italy could now claim a woman skilled in Latin, dialectic, and extemporaneous speaking – a woman who could be venerated as the equal of her male peers – Italians were right to hope that “night and the chill of all ignorance and boredom with letters may be dispersed from the hearts and minds of the men of Italy.”51 But fifty years later, the humanist religious reformer Pier Paolo Vergerio cast this same point in a more explicitly religious light. “Amazed and consoled” by the elevated intellects and pious spirits of women like Marguerite de Navarre,

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Vittoria Colonna, Rene of Ferrara, and Leonora Gonzaga, Vergerio insisted that these women were signs of the breadth and depth of God’s power: “If the goodness of God will be rousing us with these fervent spirits in one sex and in the other, in this and in that city and province, these spirits will be able to awaken us from a long sleep and scald us in the cognition of the true paths and in service of God, more than all the writers of the world who every day write many reforms for us and more than all the councils that could ever be held.”52 In ominous tones, Vergerio then emphasized the darkness that he and so many others believed was overtaking them, offering the apocalyptic warning that these elite, learned women pointed out “the way that [Christ] will come soon to purge and show the holy vineyard and Church of the Lord.”53 Unlike the pious intellectuals at the center of this study, Vergerio eventually repudiated the Catholic church and fled Italy, but his focus on how women signified the power of God was echoed by Catholic literati who likewise emphasized that women, alongside men, actively constructed an alternative religious community.54 The humanist and papal secretary Luca Contile conferred with Colonna as he composed a dialogue between a group of men and women gathered together for a Lenten meal. In a subsequent letter to a friend, Contile recounted that he had been unable to finish the dialogue because he believed he was unworthy of the truths he was trying to express. Colonna alleviated this frustration by answering specific theological questions while modeling the ideal Christian mind – at once educated and cultivated but at the same time animated less by training than by grace: She began to ask me if I had consumed the spiritual banquets, and I replied that I had not because I did not deserve to partake of them. Nevertheless, so that we would not simply chat, I said that God would soon help me finish them. She wished me to talk with her about the first, about God and about how he is three in one. So, although it was for me to answer, as I said what I knew, I learned from her what I needed. In short, I know with certainty that the spirit quickens and the letter kills, and I see how a Christian mind that has good judgment to work with is able to set others on the road to salvation. . . . This so honored lady, whom I call the Queen of Sheba, is full of humility and learning (riverenza e dottrina), which is, I believe, infused rather than acquired by through training (con arte).55

The Queen of Sheba reference (1 Kings 10:1 –13) shrouds Colonna in biblical wrapping even as Contile presents her as someone who was praiseworthy for her own knowledge rather than for her desire to seek wisdom from others. Unlike Colonna, the biblical Queen of Sheba is not presented as a woman who possessed wisdom herself or engendered it in others, but appears instead as a

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capable judge of knowledge who sought out Solomon to confirm that he was wise. By contrast, Contile – like many of his male peers – recognized Colonna as an interlocutor who wrote, conversed, corresponded, and conveyed divine knowledge just as he himself wanted to do. By lauding her he identified both a transformative kind of knowledge – one that sent him down the road toward salvation – and located this type of knowledge not only in women but in relationships and interactions among like-minded spiritual seekers. Likewise, Colonna’s friend Michelangelo wrote that listening to her “has made me such that I’ll never be my own again.” To explain her potent effect on him, he reached for the traditional explanation about how divine inspiration overcomes a woman’s natural shortcomings. It must mean that “a man within a woman, or rather a god/speaks through her mouth.”56 Michelangelo’s poetic praise of Colonna did not simply reinscribe this tradition, however, based as it was on the premise of female inferiority; instead, he envisioned Colonna as a writer whose ability to write and to think was simultaneously the instrument and the source of her transformative power. Putting a pen in her hand, Michelangelo presented himself as a surface that awaited Colonna’s inscription: I offer my blank page to your sacred ink, so that love’s deceptions may vanish and mercy may write the truth

What’s more, he asked her not for a vague reflection of divinity, but for the answer to a specific theological question: I beg to know from you, high and godly lady, whether humbled sin holds a lower rank in heaven than sheer good.57

By asking this question about the metaphysical effects of human depravity and goodness, Michelangelo appealed to Colonna not only as a visionary – a point of access to the divine – but as a peer or conversation partner who worked in the same genre (poetry) with the same goal of achieving a deeper understanding of God. Colonna’s role of inspiring the artist or writer to know the divine recalls the way Christian writers used classical muses or the symbols of sapientia and philosophia as feminine personifications of divine wisdom. As Barbara Newman puts it in her subtle study of medieval allegory, the popularity of female figures is not about “representations of woman” but instead about “modes of religious imagination” or ways of thinking about humanity, divinity, and the connection between the two.58 Michelangelo, however, invokes Colonna – a living friend – in a different way by insisting both that her writing

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is like his painting, and that she changes him not because she is a symbol or a medium of something, but because she has the ability to create as he does. By using poetry – Colonna’s genre – to praise her and inscribe her in the circle of writers, he affirms that the act and effect of Colonna’s writings are akin to his own. “Draw within me from outside,” he tells her, “as I do on a blank sheet or in stone.”59 Michelangelo’s poetic conflation of Colonna and the literati is echoed in the more explicit language Pietro Bembo used when he extolled the virtues of her poetry. Bembo judged Colonna’s writing not as women’s work but as vernacular lyric poetry, using the same standards he applied to verses by men; by lauding her work in a letter to a mutual friend, Bembo affirmed that Colonna was a member of their community.60 By exchanging these kinds of assessments, the community of literati established and upheld communal standards and affirmed that women, too, were bound by these strictures. “We live in an age,” Bembo proclaimed, “in which men have weapons equal to the virtue of the more praised and famous ancients.” Colonna’s accomplishments simultaneously supported his claims (she too had weapons that equaled the ancients), and marked her as unique – as a woman who had, as he wrote to her directly, “more excellence in this art [of poetry] than any other woman and more than nature concedes to your sex.”61 Encomia for a female writer like Colonna thus interlaced the assumption that speaking or writing by women was a sign of divine grace with the new focus on how to create a spiritualized intellectual culture. This development is evident not only in the way men talked about exemplary women, but also in the way these women talked about themselves and to others. Here, too, earlier models sharpen the distinctive options available to educated women in the sixteenth century. In the fourteenth century, Catherine of Siena did not authorize her own voice in the terms her hagiographer used. Instead of presenting herself as an ascetic or a visionary, she invoked an apostolic calling – an equally familiar model but one that was also more threatening to institutional ecclesial power. At the other end of the spectrum (and two centuries earlier), Heloise spoke not only as a faithful wife to Peter Abelard and leader of nuns in the convent he insisted she join, but also as a Christian convinced that her religion made no distinction between laypeople and monks. In this way she, like Catherine of Siena, buttressed her claim to authority by appealing to the apostolic ideal from the early Christian church. She did not then suggest, as the confessors of female visionaries often did, that it was not she who spoke but God who spoke through her.62 But the move in the sixteenth century to laud educated women as religious intercessors encouraged these later women to weld traditional models together

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with claims to intellectual acumen. Like the learned housewife Magdalia in Erasmus’s colloquy, Colonna and Roper both laid claim to some classical training, Colonna through her use of classical symbols and references in her vernacular poetry, and Roper through her accomplished use of Latin. The question for all involved was how this knowledge could be transformed into spirituality. This is what Erasmus underscored when he insisted that education made it possible for Thomas More’s daughters to disregard, for example, issues of style or deportment when listening to a sermon and to hear instead only the spiritual truths: “If the preacher let fall anything foolish or irreligious or off the point, as we see not seldom happens nowadays, they know how to make fun of it or ignore it or protest against it. This, and only this, is what listening to a sermon means.”63 Although less explicitly invested in technical rhetorical training, Reginald Pole similarly highlighted the link between an educated use of language and the power to discern the spirit when he thanked Colonna for her “eloquent and apt” words of comfort and her ability to convey the consolation of the Holy Spirit. Praising women was one way the literati fused together the power of religious exceptionalism and the virtues of education into a model both men and women could emulate as they differentiated themselves from the rest of society.

in what sense is this use of praise distinctive? variations within Christian hagiography can help sharpen the points of contrast here. In traditional Catholicism, saints were praised according to a mimetic logic: Because saints were human, other humans could aspire to do what they did. Richard Kieckhefer points out, however, that late-medieval hagiographers placed less emphasis on imitatio than pedagogy. They counseled readers to admire rather than imitate a saint’s extraordinary feats of asceticism or self-mortification. Nevertheless, this line between admiration and imitation was difficult to locate because the admirable virtues were often manifest in extreme practices. Thus hagiographers turned the description of the extremes into a pedagogic strategy. For instance, they explained that if the saint was able to be perfectly chaste, the lay reader might find a way to remain sexually faithful within a marriage. The extremes were thereby used to jolt the reader into reform – to inspire a different view of one’s life and aspirations.64 By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the pedagogic element was even more pronounced, and hagiography was closely akin to the exempla that humanists used as teaching tools. Like most educated people who were influenced by humanist rhetoric, these Catholic scholarly types believed that praise could inspire virtue. So mimetic logic gave way to pedagogic motives.

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As Margaret More Roper explained, the best way to imitate Christ “is by hearkening to what he said for our learning and instruction.”65 Her own act of translating a treatise on the Our Father was mimetic in this sense, because it taught people about the prayer that Christ taught his followers. It was a pedagogic form of mimesis, though, rather than a mimesis based on literal similitude: The point was not to do exactly what Christ did, but instead to extend and further Christ’s work of teaching. The kind of praise that pious literati in the sixteenth century exchanged seems then to fit this pedagogic model. The man who published the first collection of Colonna’s poems explained to readers that he felt compelled to do so despite her objections: “Because our Vittoria is subtle and lofty in all her poems, I have not been able (however inadequate I feel myself) to refuse you my labor in any respect in which I think that it should prove of some utility or consolation to you.”66 Another admirer explained that he could “never tire of speaking or thinking” about her “exalted virtue.”67 Similarly, Erasmus happily trumpeted Roper’s achievements, and hailed her translation of his exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer as a valuable work. Readers were thereby assured that they could benefit from thinking about these women and from reading what they wrote. That it was women who were praised in this way points up that what Eleanor Kaufman calls a “delirium of praise” did not reflect a pedagogic intent to encourage imitatio.68 Admirable women were, by definition, exceptional. And for male writers and readers in particular, they were literally not imitable. Erasmus did the same thing in his descriptions of exemplary figures. For instance, when he was asked to compose a “short life” of the biblical scholar John Colet, instead of composing a traditional humanist encomium Erasmus merged lay and religious models by pairing Colet, a lay Englishman, with Jean Vitrier, an unrelated Franciscan from the Low Countries. He conceded that these men would never be canonized by the hierarchical church, but insisted nevertheless that his readers should add the names of Vitrier and Colet on their own calendars of saints’ days – in effect encouraging his community of readers to create their own spiritual world. Moreover, his description focused on communal ideals by suggesting that both men were exemplary in their own efforts to define their communities. By contrasting a Franciscan and a layman, Erasmus critiqued the constraints of monasticism while trying to set limits and establish practices for religious scholars. He proclaimed that Vitrier, the mendicant bound by a vow, was praiseworthy insofar as he seemed detached or free of his order’s rules. Erasmus recalled approvingly that Vitrier had advised him to ignore fasts, that he had traveled often and widely, and that he cheerfully facilitated learned conversations wherever he went. Colet, by contrast, was a man who set himself apart from society by eating in moderation, even

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in the midst of immoderate feasts, and speaking Latin with fellow scholars rather than succumbing to the temptation posed by talking with women or socializing at dinner parties.69 While Vitrier’s adherence to traditional ascetic practices were self-evident signs of sanctity, Erasmus was compelled to point out explicitly that Colet’s scholarly practices helped keep him pure in the midst of the world.70 If Vitrier was remarkable because his ability to converse enabled him to transcend the confines of the ritualized life of the order, Colet was remarkable because his conversations were exclusively about books and Christ. From two different ends of the spectrum, Colet and Vitrier converged in their shared insistence that a true religious community should be a selective cohort of interactive, pious friends. The problem with a religious rule, for Vitrier, was that it artificially promoted equality among people with widely different levels of piety.71 Erasmus stressed a related point with Colet by noting that the English scholar was fastidious in his search for conversation partners. If no one adequate or suitable could be found, he preferred instead to have a boy read him something out of the Bible.72 As Erasmus claims approvingly, Colet would have separated himself from the world entirely “if he could only have found a fraternity really bound together for a Gospel life.” Colet tried to turn this wish into a material claim by building a house within the walls of a Carthusian monastery where he wanted to devote himself to “philosophy” along with a couple of select friends. As it turned out, Colet died before he could move in. It was not easy for Colet or any of the other characters surveyed here to set their community within an existing structure.73 Yet they could locate this community interactively, and one way they did so was through praise for extraordinary figures who were not so different from themselves. Consequently, like the fourteenth-century hagiographers, men and women of letters in the sixteenth century deployed praise in a nebulous zone between admiration and imitation. Although many of them were humanist pedagogues, the praise they offered was less a practical tool of change than a divining rod that they used to locate themselves and their community between heaven and earth.74

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A

friend of mine once ruefully recalled that her doctoral advisor counseled his students to live like monks. This profession, he said, originated in the monastery; the more closely you adhere to that model, the better off you’ll be. This advisor’s vision dovetails with the popular stereotype that academics are social recluses who live sequestered lives – not in ivory towers, perhaps, but still in imposing stone buildings and messy, book-lined studies that look intimidating or uninteresting to the uninitiated. The Republic of Letters, by contrast, offers a model of intellectual life that puts a premium on human relationships, and it is this emphasis on sociability – on how people interact – that fascinates scholars. Yet the kind of community created by people like Pole, Contarini, Colonna, Roper, More, and Erasmus (who all wove together their love of books and learning, their desire for God, and their need for other people) suggests that a secular notion of sociability is inadequate to account for what people seek in their relationships with other people. Jürgen Habermas, a German sociologist, made the most influential argument about how the Republic of Letters influenced the development of secular society in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. First published in 1962 and translated into English in 1989, this work argues that the Republic of Letters shaped modern society because people who viewed themselves as part of the learned community eschewed religious polemics and personal diatribes in favor of dispassionate, rational, polite conversation about weighty matters. In scholarly journals and in personal encounters, in German table societies, French salons, and English coffeehouses, men and women of letters created an ideal kind of civic life. To put it succinctly, Habermas argued that the public sphere in the world of letters spawned the public sphere in the political realm. On his account, the Republic of Letters was created alongside the absolutist state and flourished in an age of royal tyranny precisely because it provided an alternative. Thus the community occupied a middle ground 166



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between public and private, and cast a light ahead so that people could see their way into modern democracy and political engagement.1 As an ideal public – a network of people committed to a style of interaction that was urbane, discursive, and critical – the Republic of Letters is a far cry from the monastic model of academia that my friend’s mentor praised. But it may not be as far removed from the religious community I have sought to uncover here as it is implicitly assumed to be. Several substantial studies have nuanced and challenged Habermas’s argument, though they all share his question of how the Republic of Letters encouraged a particular vision of secular civic life. Peter Miller’s work on Peiresc, a model scholar in the seventeenth century, comes at the issue from a slightly different angle by emphasizing that the literati’s community was organized around a particular vision of knowledge. Thus their model of sociability was rooted in their scholarly work and epistemological assumptions. Specifically, Miller’s seventeenth-century men of letters (in a community that largely excluded women) were enthusiastic proponents of a neo-Stoic emphasis on beneficence and moderation. They believed that learning inculcated self-control – which was, they thought, an indispensable social virtue.2 These seventeenth-century scholars viewed Erasmus as a model, and there are significant similarities between their network and the community Erasmus and his peers sought. For both groups, friendship was a haven, and their scholarly community was something like a laboratory wherein they could experiment with their most cherished notions about how people ought to treat one another.3 These communities were alike in valorizing beneficence and conversation. The difference comes in because the later scholars linked friendship with constancy and reason. “Friendship emerged as a central social relation because it was rational – unlike the world outside,” Miller explains, underscoring his argument that in the period he studies, scholars prioritized reason and knowledge over the will and the affect.4 He interprets this as a secularizing move because it put a premium on human rationality. According to Miller’s schema, this form of secularization was in turn vacated because the Republic of Letters that took shape in the eighteenth century deemphasized knowledge in favor of sociability. This transition is tracked by Anne Goldgar’s work on the Republic of Letters between 1680 and 1750. Goldgar argues that in this community the demands of communal self-preservation prevailed. Learned types consequently were more interested in social interaction than scholarly output, in courtesy and unity more than in truth.5 According to Goldgar, this society was spurred by the social developments that enhanced scholarly exchange – changes in scholarly institutions and structures, a new ease of communication, rapid growth in the book trade, and the



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epistemological demands posed by scientific advances – but there was also a darker set of factors at work. The literati frequently complained that learned men were not esteemed by society, and they believed that the golden age of patronage that had long supported independent scholarly work had come to an end. Professionalization and specialization imposed more impersonal models of intellectual life, and put men of letters on the defensive as they tried to navigate the conflicts between the ethos of friendship they idealized and the pragmatic professional considerations that increasingly structured their lives. They resolved this tension through politeness. Polite conduct, it seemed, enabled them to answer both sets of demand, but for this very reason they valued codes of sociability more than anything else. Thus intractable scholarly disagreements and religious differences that in other contexts sparked violent clashes were kept at bay.6 Goldgar presents the Republic of Letters as a community that tried to use elaborate etiquette to preserve a fading selfimage; her literati are suffused with an air of pathos, reminiscent of ruined Southern aristocrats after the U.S. Civil War holding formal tea parties as their plantations crumbled around them. There is, in this tableau, little sense of how they found meaning or what oriented their values – of anything, in other words, akin to transcendence or the sacred. This may, however, be a byproduct of Goldgar’s resolute attention to the dynamics of communal self-preservation. When we turn to studies of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment Republic of Letters we are squarely located in the community at the center of Habermas’s argument. In Dena Goodman’s cultural history of the French Enlightenment and the learned community that created it, the Republic of Letters emerges free of pathos, with confident claims that their model of sociability is the proper basis for political order. Goodman’s Republic of Letters thus affirms Habermas’s thesis, though she complements this argument by demonstrating that the Republic of Letters was ruled by women. The putative feminine capacity to encourage good conversation and convivial discourse was supposed to compensate for masculine vices and create an ideal context for the exchange of serious ideas. Thus in their salons, at least, men and women of letters enacted ideals of reciprocity that they thought should prevail in political contexts as well. For Goodman the pathos comes only at the end of the period, in the 1780s, though for her as for Goldgar the agent of change is the rise of scholarly institutions: As intellectual life moved from salons to university classrooms, women were displaced and philosophy was again disembodied. Goodman concludes, regretfully, that after 150 years of female governance, “natural order” was restored in the Republic of Letters.7 This is a secular account of a community utterly convinced that humans create their



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own meaning, and that this meaning arises as an answer to the question of how to sustain human society. As all of these studies attest, the rubric of the Republic of Letters is enormously fruitful because it trains us to see that intellectual life has a communal context, even when it is not defined by institutional walls and charters. Moreover, the various claims about the relative importance of ideas, codes of conduct, and masculine and feminine models of virtue teach us to ask more subtle questions about how knowledge and practice are related. Scholarship about the Republic of Letters neatly refutes simplistic notions on both ends of the spectrum: the assumption, on the one hand, that ideas are disembodied, or the conviction, on the other hand, that practices are more important than thought. Applying this rubric to the sixteenth-century literati enables us to see familiar figures in a new light. Our study of pious literati in the sixteenth century can, in turn, bring some darkened areas of the Republic of Letters out of the shadows. Most scholars envision the Republic of Letters as a community constituted by some form of opposition to religion. In Miller’s case, learned men consolidated their self-image by rationalizing religion. In their eyes, the virtuous man was a prudent and knowledgeable scholar committed to a “confident and adaptable” Christianity. This scholar might attend daily Mass, as Peiresc did, all the while believing that religion was rational, that ethics trumped dogma, that pagan and Christian inspiration were compatible, and that education and reason could banish superstition and vice.8 These types of people consequently transformed the religious model cast by monasticism by turning decisively away from the extremes that had long been markers of charisma in Christianity. In place of ascetic practices they scrutinized the details of a scholar’s life: reading practices, note-taking techniques, filing systems, and moral persona. In place of mysticism and visions, they valorized patience, strength of mind, and self-control. 9 In the community Goldgar studies, religion is pushed to the side to ensure unity. From the community’s perspective, religion was above all a source of dissension. This was not necessarily the case for individual scholars. Many of them were in fact passionately committed Christians. But because they were transacting intellectual exchanges with people who were equally committed to a different understanding of Christianity, they compartmentalized their beliefs. Talking about religion in this context was akin to bad manners – a transgression against the norms of politeness. In Goodman’s study, religion was what the Republic of Letters superseded. This community replaced the Church as the home of European intellectual life, and their values replaced religious values; as Goodman puts it, people in the Republic of Letters began to



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look outward rather than upward, and turned their attention toward serving humanity rather than worshipping God. What we have seen in the Religious Republic of Letters is that if we think of religion not just in binary terms (as the opposite of secularization) but instead as a concept that encompasses ideas and relationships that are imbued with a transcendent dimension, we might well deepen our understanding of the search for meaning in premodern and modern societies alike. Pious intellectuals of the sixteenth century invested the separate realm of friends and admirable peers with spiritual values that (from their perspective) were not simply extensions of human virtues. Because they lived within a society structured by comprehensive systems of patronage rather than the state institutions that would be in place by the end of the century, they could not easily identify a clear boundary between public and private or institutional and personal. Consequently, they were both more urgent and less certain than were later scholars about how to find relationships that satisfied their need for trust and meaning. Instead of envisioning their community as a model for society at large, the sixteenth-century Catholic intellectuals studied here sought it out as a space apart – a space that they identified with the search for the sacred. Unlike the later antiquarians and scientists Miller describes (who thought that detailed tasks like note-taking, categorizing, and filing signified virtue and rectitude) and unlike the scholars Goldgar examines (who believed that politeness superseded rather than enabled the search for truth) our pious literati wanted textual encounters to be spiritually sustaining. Their relationships were not motivated, then, by a widespread sense that reasonable people needed to create civil modes of interacting, but rather by a more amorphous desire for transcendence. Consequently, there was a dynamic relationship between what they wanted to find in God and what they hoped for from each other. As mediators, guides, and co-travelers, they enacted religion through relationships. Although scholarship was both the source and the locus of their longing in the sense that it defined their place in culture and occupied much of their time, they did not view scholarship as an end in itself. This explains the place of the exceptional figures they praised: Women, martyrs, and fools alike simultaneously could be paragons of learned piety and embodiments of sacred power. By lauding these figures within their own circles, the literati articulated an ideal for themselves. They did not translate sacred power into something else, as seventeenth-century scholars did, but instead engaged the sacred in an intriguingly ambiguous way. In the process, they created a community and a religious genealogy for the Republic of Letters.

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introduction 1. John W. O’Malley in CWE 66:xii. 2. James D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 40. 3. Throughout this work I use the terms “intellectuals,” “literati,” and “men and women of letters” interchangeably, in place of the unwieldy but more precise “elite, highly educated Catholic men and women who, despite other differences in class and public and private duties, shared the sense that reading, writing, and studying were uniquely valuable activities and who were, in turn, viewed by their peers as admirable because of their dedication to, and skill in, these activities.” Of the three terms I use, “intellectual” seems the most vulnerable to critique. It was first coined to describe a category of people in nineteenth-century France, and there it identified a group of people who self-consciously defined themselves in opposition to the rest of society. This sort of self-consciousness is not present in the sixteenth-century context, and it is telling that from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, analogous claims to identity would most often have been made in terms of membership in a community (the Republic of Letters) rather than in the name of an abstract category (“intellectuals”). Nevertheless, the term intellectual usefully describes people who “worked with words and with the mind” in pre-nineteenth-century European culture, as Mariateresa Brocchieri cogently argues in “The Intellectual,” in Medieval Callings, ed. Jacques Le Goff, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 4. For the historical context see Eugene F. Rice and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559. 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), and John R. Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 94–111, 261 –2. Helpful discussions of the relevance of apocalyptic fears appear in Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), and in Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New York: Image Books, 1992). 5. John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102.5 (1997): 1309–42.

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6. Heiko Oberman, “Shape of Late Medieval Thought,” in The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), 21 –5. 7. On skepticism see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For a clear overview of nominalism – a notoriously slippery category – see Ullrich Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3–11. Heiko Oberman makes the point that it is in the focus on words – on “Scriptures and the prior decrees of God” in particular – that nominalism most closely parallels humanism, in “Shape of Late Medieval Thought,” 28. Steven Ozment explains how nominalism identified words as singular links between humanity and divinity in his “Mysticism, Nominalism and Dissent,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 67–92, 80. On the religious significance of humanism and rhetoric, see Charles Trinkaus, “In Our Image and Likeness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Renaissance Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 1 :151 –52, and William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). ´ 8. Pierre Imbart de La Tour, L’Evangelisme (1521–1538), Vol. 3 of Les origines de la Réforme (Paris: Hachette, 1914), 75–84. John O’Malley contextualizes Imbart de La Tour’s work and the terms “evangelism” and “spirituali ” in relation to twentieth-century approaches to Early Modern Catholicism, in Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 37–8, 83–4. On the use of these terms in the historiography of Italy, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Periodization of Sixteenth-Century Italian Religious History: The Post-Cantimori Paradigm Shift,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 269–84, and more recently, Stephen Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vicenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), 210–20. John F. D’Amico gives a cogent critique of the category “Christian humanism” in “Humanism and Pre-Reformation Theology,” in Humanism and the Disciplines, vol. 3 of Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vols., ed. Albert Rabil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 351 –2. For examples of how the category is central to important interpretations of early modern Christianity, see (among others) John Bossy’s claim that Erasmus’s “Christian humanism or humanist Christianity” facilitated the transition from traditional to early modern Christianity by replacing a religion constituted by sacraments, saints, and collective devotion with a focus on words as instruments of instruction (Christianity in the West: 1400–1700 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], 98–99). 9. Euan Cameron offers a particularly evocative version of the sense of failure when he describes Erasmus as an awkward anomaly who stood on a “lonely spit of land,” trying to stay above the fray as religious fervor threatened to swamp Christendom (The European Reformation [Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1991 ], 189). Cf. Margaret Aston’s judgment that Erasmus and other religious humanists “lost the day” (“The Northern Renaissance,” in The Meaning of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Richard L. DeMolen [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974], 71 –130, 124). Most modern assessments are variations on Ernst Troeltsch’s argument that Erasmus and



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other humanists were modern but not influential: Their form of Christianity came to fruition centuries later (Troeltsch, “Meine Bücher,” and “Verhältnis von ‘via antiqua’ und ‘via moderna’ zu Humanismus und Reformation: Religiös-theologische Bedeutung des Erasmus,” in Gesämmelte Schriften, Vol. 4 [Tübingen: Mohr, 1925, Aalen: Scientia, 1961 ], 3–18 and 762–74). John Bossy, by contrast, suggests they were widely influential but critiques them for destroying the cohesiveness of medieval Catholicism with their focus on civility. For this thesis see his Christianity in the West. Bossy’s later studies, however, suggest that this humanist vision of Christianity did not in fact prove enduring (cf. Peace in the Post Reformation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]). Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 59, 7, 87; cf. John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” Past and Present, 100 (1983): 29–61. Margaret More Roper, A deuoute treatise vpon the Pater noster (London, 1526). Early English Books Online [electronic resource]. Available from: , and in Moreana 7 (1965): 9–64, esp. 42; reprinted in Richard DeMolen, ed., Erasmus of Rotterdam: A Quincentennial Symposium (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), 93–124. On the fallacious assumptions that perpetuate this North/South divide see James D. Tracy, “Humanism and the Reformation,” in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. Steven Ozment (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), 33–58, 35–6, and Heiko Oberman, “The devotio moderna: Movement and Mystery,” in Masters of the Reformation: The Emergence of a New Intellectual Climate in Europe, trans. Dennis Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 46. Barbara Correll makes an analogous methodological point in arguing that scholars should move beyond the “let’s add woman” approach in order to analyze the “woman function” in texts by men: “Woman, marginalized or mystified or demonized, has never been excluded from the humanist Renaissance writings. On the contrary, as the repository of an ideology of identity constructing the sex-gender system of a patriarchal society, woman is everywhere in these texts, constructed to motivate the civilizing process, to further the projects of civic and Christian humanism.” Correll concludes that in their discussions of civility, humanists projected their “horror of effeminacy” onto the figure of woman (“Malleable Material, Models of Power: Woman in Erasmus’s ‘Marriage Group’ and Civility in Boys,” English Literary History 57 [1990]: 241 –62, 258). I, by contrast, am interested in how women, as textual characters and as living interlocutors, writers, and loci of praise, were implicated in the humanists’ quest for meaning. The monastery Erasmus joined in 1487 was a house of the Augustinian canons regular, and throughout his life he frequently signed himself an Augustinian canon. Monks and canons took similar vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and lived in common according to rules. The rules for canons were less restrictive, and the differences could be quite significant, as Caroline Walker Bynum’s analysis of twelfthcentury communities suggests (see Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982]). In the late Middle Ages, though, the boundaries were often blurred, and Erasmus himself did not exempt, or even specifically refer to, canons when he critiqued monks and monasteries, or when he described why an institutionalized communal religious life



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had not suited him. Consequently, like most scholars, I will refer to him as a monk or a former monk. See R. J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, Vol. 1, The Making of a Humanist 1467–1500 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 87, 114 n. 9. For a more specific discussion of what it meant to say he “left” the monastery, see Chapter 1, n. 32. These biographical details are discussed more fully in the chapters that follow. For the dating of Contarini’s tonsure and ordination and Pole’s ordination see, respectively, Elisabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 132, and Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 245. See Carlo Dionisotti, “Chierici e laici,” in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 61 ; and Douglas Biow’s discussion in Doctors, Ambassadors, and Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 35. S. N. Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger, Patrons, Clients, and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society, Themes in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 14–18, 270. Eisenstadt and Roniger, Patrons, 294. See, for example, Mervyn James’s arguments about the transformation from a “lineage” to a “civil” society in Society, Politics, and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2–3; Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 77ff. Eisenstadt and Roniger, Patrons, 219. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Anne Goldgar demonstrates that for the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters, shared codes of conduct were in fact more important than intellectual content: Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 5–7. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 30–1. Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 59. Debra Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3. L. Jardine, Erasmus, 7. My motives as a historian are in this sense analogous to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s interests in questioning the hegemony of secular assumptions in Western thought: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. 16, 72–86, 124–42.

chapter 1: a new kind of religious life 1. Erasmus, Colloquies, CWE 39:499–519, quoted passages on 501 and 505 (ASD I– 3: 403–7). 2. Erasmus, Colloquies, CWE 39:502, 504–05 (ASD I–3 406–7)



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3. The reference to geese means that laypeople will take over where clergy fail: Erasmus, Colloquies, CWE 39:518n37. 4. Erasmus, Colloquies, CWE 39:505 (ASD I–3 408). 5. Etienne succinctly describes Erasmus’s Christianity as a “religion of the pure spirit” (Jacques Etienne, Spiritualisme érasmien et théologiens louvainistes; un changement de problématique au début du XVIe siècle [Louvain : Publications universitaires de Louvain, 1956]), 50. Much of the scholarship about Erasmus offers corresponding descriptions: see, for example, John C. Olin, Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings of Erasmus, 3rd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987, orig. pub. 1965), 9; Cornelis Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence, trans. J. C. Grayson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991 ), 46– 55; Richard L. DeMolen, The Spirituality of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1987), 41 –54; R. J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, Vol. 2, Prince of Humanists 1501– 1536 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 37; Léon-E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 57; James D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 104–11 ; Manfred Hoffman, “Faith and Piety in Erasmus’s Thought,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 241 –58. 6. Thomas More, Life of Pico, ed. Anthony S. G. Edwards, in CWTM 1 :51 –127 (Latin text 281 –341). The biography More translated was written in Latin by Pico’s nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, whose own attitude toward philosophy is encapsulated in the title of his major work, Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium (The Emptiness of Pagan Philosophy [1520]). Anthony Edwards calls attention to apposite examples of how More’s version differed from the Latin in his introduction, CWTM 1 :xlv–xlvii. More omits most details about Pico’s scriptural studies, about his work describing the six days of creation, and about his assessment of Scripture as both learned and eloquent (details that take up over eight pages in the modern Latin edition; cf. CWTM 1 :304–20). Thus More’s omissions underscore his message that Pico’s exemplarity is a product of his intensive, and exclusive, attention to the Word of God. 7. CWTM 1 :56. 8. CWTM 1 :59: “And that this shuld be to hym (wandering in darkenes) as a shyning light: in which he might behold & considre: how ferr he had gone owt of [the] waye of truth. For byfore this he had bene both desyrous of glory and kindled in vaine loue: and holden in volupteouse vse of women . . . But aftyr that . . . he was ones with this variaunce wakened he drew bak his mynd flowing in riot and turned it to crist. Womennis blandimentes he chaunged in to the desire of heuenly ioyes & dispising the blast of vayneglorie which he bifore desired / now with all his mynd he began to seke the glorye and profite of christis chirche.” 9. CWTM 1 :63–5, 67. More explicitly associates books with sinfulness: Whereas the Latin simply describes Pico burning them for the “religionis causa,” More explains it is because these “trifles” might be the occasion for evil (CWTM 1 :60, cf. Latin version on 304). 10. CWTM 1 :65, 67. 11. John Bossy’s version of this thesis is particularly sophisticated, perhaps because he laments what was lost: Bossy, Christianity in the West, cf. 97–8 for the specific assessment of Erasmus. A typical description of Erasmus in general histories of the period appears in Eugene F. Rice, Jr., and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early



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Modern Europe, 151 –2. On Erasmus’s standing as a model for (secular) intellectuals see Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). See, for example, Jonathan Woolfson’s helpful discussion of the disagreements in English historiography about the relationship between Tudor humanism and religion: “Introduction,” in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 7–9. William Bouwsma details the tension between these two types in The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). He based an early version of this argument primarily on evidence from the first half of the sixteenth century: “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” reprinted in his A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 19–73. On the growing popularity of skepticism among intellectuals see, above all, Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Although Popkin argues that the Reformation heightened a sense of intellectual crisis, he begins with Savonarola, who died nearly twenty years before Luther decisively challenged Church authority. Other influential versions of the “crisis” thesis appear in Philippe Desan, ed., Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991 ). Erasmus, Colloquies, CWE 39:504 (ASD I–3 406). Erasmus, Colloquies, CWE 39:503 (ASD I–3 405). The famous passage about lowly women reading and farmers and weavers singing portions of the Bible is in the Paraclesis (LB V, 6) trans. John C. Olin in Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings of Erasmus, 3rd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987), 97–108, quote on 101. CWTM 1 :51 –2. Anthony S. G. Edwards, “Introduction to the Life of Pico,” in CWTM 1 :liii–lv. CWTM 1 :62. CWTM 1 :57–8. Brian Gogan, The Common Corps of Christendom: Ecclesiological Themes in the Writings of Sir Thomas More (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982); J.D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 105. Sileni Alcibiades, trans. R. A. B. Mynors in CWE 34:277. Festina Lente, trans. R. A. B. Mynors in CWE 33:12. Ep. 63 in The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Rogers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947; reprinted, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 123; an English translation appears in St. Thomas More: Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rogers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 106–7. Cf. Ep. 101, More, Correspondence, 249–50: “Your zeal for knowledge,” More writes his children, “binds me to you almost more closely than the ties of blood” (Selected Letters, 146). Ep. 63, 101, 106, 128. For an introduction to Margaret More Roper, see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Margaret More Roper: The Learned Woman in Tudor England,” Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 449–65.



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26. Ep. 106, More, Correspondence, 254–55. The permeability of gender boundaries in this community of literati is bound up with its religiosity because the contemporaneous development of professional identity contributed to a hardening of gender categories, as Judith Brown observes (Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith Brown and Robert C. Davis [New York: Longman, 1998]). 27. Ep. 63, More, Correspondence, 121. 28. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 33–45. 29. Lawrence Manley, Convention, 1500–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 3. 30. Peter Iver Kaufman draws a similar conclusion for a different purpose in his article about how Margaret found it possible to argue with her father about his decision to defy the king because she had become a member of Erasmus’s coterie and thus was committed to Erasmus’s sense of a consensio studiorum, which in this case contrasted with the consensus fidelium that More invoked (“Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper and ‘Well-learned’ Men,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 [1989]: 443–56). 31. Ep. 706, following L. Jardine’s translation in Erasmus, Man of Letters, 28 (cf. CWE 5:190, Allen 3:133). 32. See Ep. 447 (CWE 4:8–32, Allen 2:293–312) for Erasmus’s subsequent (and largely successful) attempts to be absolved from specific requirements involving dress and residence that technically applied to him because he remained a canon. The circumstances and content of the letter are explained in the editors’ introductions (Allen 2:291 –93 and McConica in CWE 4:6–7). On the differences between monks and canons and my justification for referring to Erasmus as a monk see the Introduction of the present book, n14. 33. John Van Engen, “Introduction,” in Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, trans. John Van Engen (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 26–7. 34. In this, as in so many of my interpretations of Erasmus, I have been guided by J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, esp. 15–23. Cf. R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 392–97, for Erasmus’s relationship with the movement. 35. Compendium Vitae, CWE 4:407, Allen, 1 :46–52; Ep. 447, quote at line 404 (CWE 4:17–19, Allen, 2:303). 36. Ep. 858, CWE 6:88, Allen 3:375, translation amended slightly. 37. Ep. 447, CWE 4:9, 19, Allen 2:294, 302–03; Ep. 13, CWE 1 :17, Allen 1 :87. On Erasmus’s argument that monasteries should be reformed by making monks study harder, cf. J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 20–2, 30–2, 81. 38. Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 ), 25. ´ 39. On Erasmus’s friendships, see Yvonne Charlier, Erasme et l’amitié, d’après sa correspondance (Paris: Société d’Edition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1977), 71 –81. See also J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 22; and N. H. Minnich and W. W. Meissner, “The Character of Erasmus,” American Historical Review, 83 (1978): 598–624. 40. Ep. 1117, CWE 7:320, Allen 4:293. Tracy discusses this translation and cites other uses of ordo (J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 81, 241 n38, citing Ep. 337 and Ep. 1167). 41. “Make Haste Slowly,” CWE 33:12. Jardine’s descriptions of the “confraternity of Erasmianism” show how it was akin to an estate (L. Jardine, Erasmus, 20, 57).



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42. Ep. 141, CWE 1 :308, Allen 1 :331 –332. Cf. J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 30. 43. Beatus Rhenanus, The Life of Erasmus in John C. Olin, ed. and trans., Christian Humanism and the Reformation, 55. The Latin text is in Allen, 1 :56–71. On this Life see Bruce Mansfield, Phoenix of His Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 17–21. 44. CWTM 15:299, 301. 45. CWTM 15:259. 46. CWTM 15: 297: “If you consider work, [Erasmus] sometimes does more in one day than you do in many months, and if you consider the usefulness of the work, he sometimes does more fruitful work for the Church in one month than you do in several years, unless you think that anyone’s fasts or perfunctory prayers do as much or do such widespread good as so many great volumes, through which the whole world is instructed in righteousness.” 47. Ratio LB V 77B–C. 48. CWTM 15:295: “Now if you look even closer with an unbiased eye, first considering the fruitfulness of his works and then appraising the testimony of those who have derived from his works either illumination in their studies or fervor in their affections, I for one think you will not find it at all likely that the heart from which such sparks of piety leap forth to kindle the spirits of others is utterly cold in itself.” See also More’s discussion of how learning forestalls pride in his “Letter to Oxford,” (CWTM 15:31) and his arguments about how it inculcates virtue and a search for the good rather than glory in a letter to William Gonell, his children’s tutor (Ep. 63, More, Correspondence, 120–23). 49. K. Eden, Friends, 25, 112–37; R. J. Schoeck, “Telling More from Erasmus: An Essai in Renaissance Humanism,” Moreana 23, no.92 (1986):11 –19. 50. L. Jardine makes a similar point about the work scholars did on behalf of the scholarly community, but they were working also on behalf of the scholarly community conceived as a religious community; thus the interest in purity that I discuss further on in the present chapter (Erasmus, Man of Letters, 43). 51. J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 77; Augustijin, Erasmus, 101 ; Margaret Phillips, “Erasmus and the Art of Writing,” in Scrinium Erasmianum, Vol. 1, 341, citing LB I.100B–101 E. 52. K. Eden, Friends, 150. 53. Ep. 999, CWE 7:18, Allen 4:16. 54. Ep. 706, CWE 5:189, Allen 3:133; Ep. 683, CWE 5:147, Allen 3:104. 55. Alan Bray makes an analogous point in his posthumous book, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 56. David Wootton, “Friendship Portrayed: A New Account of Utopia,” History Workshop Journal 45 (1998): 28–47, 37. 57. D. Wootton, “Friendship Portrayed,” 42. 58. CWTM 4:xxxiii–xxxix; William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 195–254, 201. 59. The changing nature of the English court is discussed in more detail in Ch. 2. 60. J. A. Guy credits Elton with debunking “the myth of More’s reluctance” (The Public Career of Sir Thomas More [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980], 6 n23), and to judge from two recent biographies, that seems now to be the consensus: Richard



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61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

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Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1984), 189–93, and Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 178. CWTM 4:99–101. Ep. 999, CWE 7:22–23, Allen 4:20; cf. Ep. 1117, CWE 7:321, Allen 4:294. This judgment that only with Utopia did More make a serious claim on the scholarly community’s attention echoes that found in R. Marius, Thomas More, 189, and J. H. Hexter in “Introduction: Utopia and Its Historical Milieu,” in CWTM 4:xxviii. A concise account of how the first five editions were brought to press is provided in Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. and trans. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 270–76. All subsequent references to Utopia are to this edition, unless otherwise noted. Utopia, 50–1. Utopia, 101. James D. Tracy, Erasmus: The Growth of a Mind (Geneva: Droz, 1972), 129, citing Ep. 370. Cf. R.J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, Vol. 2, The Prince of Humanists 1501– 1536 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 165. Erasmus, Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium), trans. Betty Radice in CWE 27:77–153, quote on 136 (ASD IV–3 169). Ibid. Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio principis christiani), trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath in CWE 27: 199–288, quotes on 204. Ibid. Léon-E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography, 176n21 ; and Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach,” in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981 ), 3–23, 5. K. Eden, Friends, 154. CWE 27:xxvi; cf. James D. Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus: A Pacifist Intellectual and His Political Milieu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). CWE 27:302, 320 (ASD IV–2 74, 96). See R. J. Schoeck, Prince of Humanists, 131, for a discussion of Ep. 335, Erasmus’s audacious letter of 21 May 1515 to Leo X that, by critiquing the war waged by his predecessor Julius II, encourages the pope to seek peace. Ep. 858, CWE 6:76, Allen 3:364. Ep. 481, CWE 4:115, Allen 2:371. Ep. 1347, CWE 9:424. Ep. 1097, CWE 7:298, Allen 4:256. Ep. 858, CWE 6:76, Allen 3:364. Ep. 1033, CWE 7:115, Allen 4:106. Nancy Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 47. LB 4:480; cf. CWE 27:136. Ep. 829, CWE 5:401, Allen 3:295. Ep. 688, CWE 5:158, Allen 3:111, my translation. Ep. 999, CWE 7:18–19, Allen 4:15–16. Ep. 999, CWE 7:18, Allen 4:15.



180 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

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Ep. 999, CWE 7:24, Allen 4:21. Ep. 999, CWE 7:23, Allen 4:20. Ep. 999, CWE 7:19–20, Allen 4:17. Ep. 999, CWE 7:21, Allen 4:17. Ep. 999, CWE 7:19, Allen 4:17. Ep. 999, CWE 7:21. Erasmus further describes how More trained his wife, in the colloquy “Marriage,” CWE 39:314–315. Ep. 1233, CWE 8: 297–98, Allen 4:577. CWTM 1 :51. Barbara Correll, “Malleable Material,” 241 –62, 242–44; cf. B. Correll, The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Here I use the familiar English rendering of the title of Erasmus’s Latin adage Omnium horarum homo, which literally means “A man for all hours.” Ep. 1233, CWE 8:297, Allen, 4:578. Adage I.iii.86; LB II, 144C; CWE 31 :305. Ep. 477, CWE 4:98, Allen 2:359 R. Marius, Thomas More, 240, 245. Germain Marc’hadour, “Thomas More’s Spirituality,” in St. Thomas More: Action and Contemplation, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 123–60, 149. Ep. 461, CWE 4:66, Allen 2:339. Ep. 461, CWE 4:66–67, Allen 2:339. Ep. 461, CWE 4:68, Allen 2:340. Ep. 474, CWE 4:93, Allen 2:354. Ep. 481, CWE 4:116, Allen 2:372. Ep. 499, CWE 4:163, Allen 2:413–14 (“nugget” translates talentum Atticum, literally “an Attic talent”). Ep. 499, CWE 4:163, Allen 2:414. Ep. 461, CWE 4:67, Allen 2:339. Ep. 461, CWE 4:67, Allen 2:339. Ep. 499, CWE 4:164, Allen 2:414. Ep. 401, CWE 4:116, Allen 2:372. Ep. 481, CWE 4:116, Allen 2:372. Ep. 482, CWE 4:117, Allen 2:373. CWTM 15:195, 191. CWTM 15:10. Ep. 499, CWE 4:164, Allen 2:414. On the location and setting of the house in Chelsea, see P. Ackroyd, Life, 248; and William Roper, Life, 221. Ep. 31, More, Correspondence, 86. Ep. 188, More, Selected Letters, 173; Ep. 2659 in Allen 10:31 –34. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 45. The Latin text is provided in Utopia, 32. The early English translation renders it much as I do: “I leave to myself, I meane to my booke, no time” (Utopia, trans. Raphe Robynson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956], 11).



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125. Ep. 189, More, Correspondence, 438. 126. This is the paradox that Daniel Kinney identifies when he describes More as a man beset by an unresolved tension between activism and asceticism (CWTM 15:lxxxix). 127. Ep. 63, More, Correspondence, 120–23; trans. from More, Selected Letters, 103–07. See Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 47–57, for a very different interpretation of the significance of learned women: they argue that the acceptance of humanistically-trained women in the sixteenth century demonstrates the widespread assumption that humanism was more about show than substance. 128. Ep. 75, CWE 1 :151. 129. Ep. 138, CWE 1 :295, Allen 1 :321 (my emphasis). This translation issue is discussed in J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 23, 32, cf 222 n. 33, 226 n. 27. 130. “Make Haste Slowly,” CWE 33:10. 131. K. Eden, Friends, 112–16; cf. 25–32, 122–41, for other discussions of the idea that Erasmus saw a close connection between Platonic, Pythagorean, and (early) monastic notions of the ideal way of life as one best practiced among friends who hold all things in common. For discussions of Erasmus’s notion that philosophia Christi was a practicing for death, see Michael A. Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London: Duckworth, 1980), 96–100, 173–74; Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Christening Pagan Mysteries: Eramus in Pursuit of Wisdom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981 ), 41. ´ 132. Georges Chantraine, “Mystère” et “Philosophie du Christ” selon Erasme (NamurGembloux: Facultés Universitaires, 1971 ), 205, discusses how Erasmus combines Platonic and Christian visions of spiritual progress through his use of both vertical and horizontal metaphors. Cf. J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries 247n5. 133. C. A. L. Jarrot, “Erasmus’ In Principio Erat Sermo: A Controversial Translation,” Studies in Philology 61 (1964): 35–40. 134. See, for example, his Methodux verae theologiae and the letters to Paul Volz and Eck (Eps. 858 and 844). 135. Erasmus, Antibarbari, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, in CWE 23:82–83 (ASD I–1 103). 136. L. Jardine, Erasmus, 67. 137. Quoted in L-E. Halkin, Erasmus, 15. 138. Ep. 63, More, Correspondence, 121, my emphasis. 139. Ep. 909, CWE 6:218, Allen 3:465. 140. In Erasmus’s treatise on letter-writing, De conscribendis epistolis, ASD I–2, 224–5. See Judith Rice Henderson, “Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing,” in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. J. J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 331 –55. On the precedents for Erasmus’s definition, see J. Monfasani, “Three Notes on Renaissance Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 5 (1987): 107–18. 141. Erasmus, Epistolae Hieronymi (Froben, 1524), 1 :218. 142. J. R. Henderson, “Erasmus on Letter-Writing,” 331 –55. 143. Ep. 15, CWE 1:21. See Ep. 1033, CWE 7:114, for his discussion of how the letter reflects the author.



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144. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 196. 145. G. Chantraine, Mystère,” 61 –3. 146. Margaret Mann Phillips beautifully summarizes Erasmus’s ideas about how writing well animates ideas and facilitates an adaptive imitation rather than rote copying in “Erasmus and the Art of Writing,” 335–50. 147. Ep. 396, CWE 3:256. Letters, like pictures (and sometimes in a way even more immediate than pictures), can convey a visceral sense of presence (see, for example, letters from More [Ep. 684, CWE 5:150] and Erasmus [Ep. 107, CWE 1 :201 ] discussed in L. Jardine, Erasmus, 31). 148. Ep. 396; CWE 3:256. 149. Ep. 396, Preface to ed. of Jerome; CWE 3:265–6. 150. For an elaboration of this dynamic in terms of technical rhetorical techniques, see Manfred Hoffman, “Erasmus: Rhetorical Theologian,” in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Eden emphasizes a different feature of this relationship between reader and author by focusing on how Erasmus emphasized, albeit inconsistently, that the reader thereby accrues rights to the knowledge in the text (cf. K. Eden, Friends, 117, 134–38, 151 –62). 151. Erasmus quotes are from J. Olin’s translation of Paraclesis (Christian Humanism and the Reformation, 101, 104). This discussion depends on Jerrold Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 152. Paraclesis trans. J. Olin, Christian Humanism, 105, 108. 153. Preface to Enchiridion, Ep. 858, CWE 6:78, Allen 3:366. 154. Thus his interest in reading Greek; but note also his failure to read Hebrew (L-E. Halkin, Erasmus, 63). See also Brian Cummings’s subtle discussion of the paradoxes Erasmus faced in asserting that words clearly convey Christ while emphasizing the importance of original languages known to few (Literary Culture of the Reformation, 109–10). 155. Ep. 447, CWE 4:29, Allen 2:309. 156. Ep. 1334, CWE 9:257, Allen 5:173–92: “The teachings of Christ, which in former times were not touched by the clash of words, began to depend on the support of philosophy: this was the first step of the Church on the downward path.” 157. Ep. 337, CWE 3:130. 158. Ep. 593, CWE 4:398, Allen 2:599. 159. CWE 66:30 (LB V 9B). 160. Early in his career Erasmus dealt with the question of the relationship between classical and Christian studies in his Antibarbari. For this work, and its dependence on the De doctrina, see K. Eden, Friends, 17; J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 24–6; Charles Béné, Erasme et Saint Augustin ou Influence de saint Augustin sur ´ l’humanisme d’Erasme (Geneva: Droz, 1969); M.D. Boyle, Christening, 3–25; and Ernst-Wilhelm Kohls, Die Theologie des Erasmus (Basel: F. Reinhardt, 1966), I, 35–7 and II, 55–6. 161. The Enchiridion of Erasmus, ed. and trans. Raymond Himelick (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1970), 52. In quoting from the Enchiridion I have followed Himelick



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162. 163. 164. 165.

166. 167. 168. 169.

170. 171. 172. 173. 174.

175. 176. 177. 178.

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for reasons of style, but for the more recent authoritative translation see CWE 66; the Latin appears in LB V 8A. Enchiridion, trans. Himelick, 52, LB V 8A. Enchiridion, trans. Himelick, 53, LB V 8A. B. Cummings, Grammar of Grace, 111 ; J. D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 176. Jerry H. Bentley describes Erasmus on the verge of, but not in, the period when textual criticism became a scientia per se (“Erasmus’ Annotationes in Novum Testamentum and the Textual Criticism of the Gospels,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 67 [1976]: 33–53). Enchiridion, trans. Himelick, 53, LB V 8A. Ep. 3, More, Correspondence, 6. Ep. 388, CWE 3:236, Allen 2:198. Ep. 97, More, Correspondence, 246. Lisa Jardine makes a related point in her analysis of what portraits of friends meant to More and Erasmus. Whereas Erasmus equates intimate friendship with the “pleasure taken in a precise physical rendering of the absent friend,” More differs by focusing not on the bodily “but on the textual trace of friendship” (Erasmus, 31). Both, in other words, signaled their intense desire for immediacy by pondering the (in)capacity of various media to convey it, and More emphasized the distinctive pleasures of interactions even more so than did Erasmus. CWTM 1 :85, annotated on 233. For a reading that focuses instead on how the letters about the diptych create an enduring monument to Erasmus, see L. Jardine, Erasmus, 27–39. Ep. 683, CWE 5:147, Allen 3:104. Ep. 684, CWE 5:151, Allen 3:107 (in primis falsarium). CWE 61 :245n10; see also Erasmus’s De copia CWE 24:477 and Terence Cave, “‘Enargeia’: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence,” L’Esprit Créateur 16 (1976): 5–19. Ep. 388, CWE 3:230, Allen 2:193. R. Marius, Thomas More, 464. P. Ackroyd, Life of Thomas More, 360. CWTM 14:3.

chapter 2: creating an alternative community 1. Anyone who writes on Pole is deeply indebted to Thomas F. Mayer, not only for specific arguments (many of which I take up in this chapter), but also for his careful assessment of an enormous number of primary sources. His numerous valuable articles and the calendar of Pole’s letters that he has prepared are listed in Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). There Mayer evaluates the sources for these standard biographical details about Pole (see 46–7). On the grant of £100, see J. S. Brewer and J. Gairdner, eds., Letters & Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1862–1910), 3:2, 1544. 2. Starkey to Pole, February 15, 1535, in Thomas Starkey, England in the Reign of King Henry the Eighth, Part I: Starkey’s Life and Letters, Early English Text Society, Extra Series no. 12 (London: N. Trübner, 1871 ), xiv.



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3. De Unitate was published against Pole’s wishes. I used the facsimile reprint of a 1539 edition from Rome entitled Reginaldi Poli Cardinalis Britanni, ad Henricum Octavum Britanniae Regem, pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, libri quator (facs. repr. Farnborough, Hants: Gregg Press, 1965), hereafter referred to as De unitate. Quotes in English are, with some emendations, from Pole’s Defense of the Unity of the Church, ed. and trans. J. G. Dwyer (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965), hereafter referred to as Defense. Pole, De unitate, 1 r, 4v; Defense, 1, 8; translation adapted slightly. De unitate is commonly described as a Catholic defense of church unity and papal authority (see, among others, David Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971 ], 56), but Pole’s understanding of papal supremacy was in fact quite complicated. On this see Mayer’s nuanced analysis in Reginald Pole, 13–33. 4. For the argument that patronage is a relationship based on a straightforward logic of exchange see, among others, Lauro Martines, Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 14; and David Rundle, “Humanism before the Tudors: On Nobility and the Reception of the studia humanitatis in Fifteenth-Century England,” in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 22–42, 23. 5. John R. Hale, “Patronage,” in A Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance, ed. John R. Hale (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981 ), 239; cf. Martines, Strong Words (35): “The high Renaissance concentrated power and wealth in fewer hands; blood nobility became the new, all-important social ideal; and the strings of patronage were more tightly drawn by fewer men. How could clients afford not to “love” their patrons?” Thus Martines tracks the complicated interplay between the language of love and the rhetoric of patronage and how both were used to navigate the frustrations inherent in the “give-and-take” between clients and patrons. 6. Pole, De unitate, 2v; Defense, 3. 7. See, most recently, Mayer, Reginald Pole, 442, 451 (although Mayer also qualifies that judgment – cf. 6–7 and 114); and Francesco Gui, L’attesa del concilio: Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole nel movimento degli ‘spirituali’, Storia e società (Rome: Editoria Università Elettronica, 1997), 366, 372. 8. Reginald Pole, The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, Vol. 1, A Calendar, 1518–1546: Beginnings to Legate of Viterbo, ed. Thomas F. Mayer, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002), 40. 9. Ronald Weissman, “Taking Patronage Seriously: Mediterranean Values and Renaissance Society,” in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. F. W. Kent and P. Simons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 25–45, 39. 10. Shmuel Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger, Patrons, Clients, and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society. Themes in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 14, 277–82. 11. Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 12. G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 420; cf. Elton, “Tudor Government: The Points of Contact; III: The Court,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1976): 211 –16, and Reform and



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13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

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Reformation: England 1509–1558 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); David Starkey, “Introduction” (1 –24, 11, 13), and “Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485–1547” (71 –118, 71, 77), both in David Starkey et al., eds., The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987). Thomas F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Thomas Starkey: Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, ed. Thomas F. Mayer, Camden Fourth Series, Vol. 37 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1989), x. Jonathan Woolfson shows that law degrees, especially from Padua, became the major route to civil and political service for sixteenth-century Englishmen, in Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 40. T. Starkey, Starkey’s Life and Letters, xi–xvii. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal, 232–34. T. Starkey, Starkey’s Life and Letters, xiv–xvi. There is debate about when Pole went to Italy, but I follow Mayer’s dating in Pole, Calendar, Correspondence, no. 5. Pole, De unitate, 81 v–r, Defense, 197; on Pole’s indictment of Henry’s ambition, see Defense, 11, and Mayer, Reginald Pole, 17–18. Mayer, Reginald Pole, 21 –3. Pole, Calendar, Correspondence, no. 3. See Mary Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5–11, for a deft discussion of this topic and references to key theoreticians. More recently, Harry Berger, Jr., analyzes the impact of performativity in his work on courtesy books: The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9–25. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. Vol. 1, The History of Manners; Vol. 2, Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (New York: Clarendon Press, 1998); Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformation of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); cf. Berger, Absence of Grace. Though they work without reference to Elias, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) supports the basic thesis about how performance became a crucial marker of status. For this point see Berger, Absence of Grace, 24. Berger contends that Elias’s thesis is marred by the evolutionary assumption that repression has increased through the ages but that the structural argument in Vol. 2 of The Civilizing Process can be used to dispense with the “Freudian nub” of Elias’s thesis and to develop a psychologically neutral thesis about the changing economy of representation (Absence of Grace, 34–60). Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: Language and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 95–6.



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26. Berger, Absence of Grace, 24, citing Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobilità in Italia: Secoli XIV–XVIII (Bari and Rome: Laterza, 1988), 15 and 22n24; Stanley Chojnacki, “Social Identity in Renaissance Venice: The Second Serrata,” Renaissance Studies 8 (1994): 341 –58; Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 86–90; Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 ); and Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 74–120. 27. For my use of the term intellectual, see the Introduction, n3, and n56 in this section. 28. Pole, Calendar, Correspondence, no. 5; also in Brewer and Gairdner, eds., Letters and Papers, 3:1 no. 198. 29. Ep. 215, CWE 2:148; Allen 1 :450. The literati in fact often hailed Henry as a good scholar, as Erasmus’s glowing praise in 1522 attests: “That prince has a wonderfully fertile and subtle intelligence, which is extraordinarily effective in any field upon which he turns it. And as a boy he practised his pen with some diligence, even writing letters to me personally. It is not many years since he composed a theological disputation on the theme whether a layman has an obligation to pray out loud. It is his wont to have some acquaintance with books of scholastic theology, and he enjoys the discussion of some theological point even over his wine. Sometimes the discussion on some literary topic is prolonged until late at night. . . . If his way of writing has something about it not unlike my own, there will be nothing new or strange in that, since as a boy he applied himself studiously to my works at the suggestion of my honoured lord William Mountjoy, whom he had then as the companion of his studies” (Ep. 1313, CWE 9:181 –2). 30. Peter G. Bietenholz, ed. Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 1, s.v. “Blount, William” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 31. Pole, Defense, 43, De unitate, 55r. 32. Pole, Defense, 183–4, De unitate, 75r. 33. Brewer and Gairdner, eds. Letters and Papers, VIII, no. 214, quoted in Woolfson, Padua, 40 and 97; cf. Mayer, Starkey and the Commonweal, 202–3. 34. Woolfson, Padua, 53. 35. Woolfson, Padua, 40–1. Thomas F. Mayer pointed out to me that this distinction is in fact quite complicated because the “best of the law faculty were men of extremely wide and deep culture, including many ‘humanists’” (personal communication, December 2004). 36. A. B. Cobban, The Medieval Universities: Their Development and Organization (London: Methuen, 1975), 168, 203. Cf. Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 37. Peter Classen, Studium und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Schriften, Vol. 29, ed. Johannes Fried (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1983), 25. For scholars’ legal status, varied by time and place, see Pearl Kibre, Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages: The Rights, Privileges, and Immunities of Scholars and Universities at Bologna, Padua, Paris, and Oxford (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1962); and Paolo Nardi, “Relations with Authority,” in A History of the University in Europe, gen. ed. Walter Rüegg, Vol. 1, Universities in the Middle



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39.

40.

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42.

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 77–107. Alexander of Roes (ca. 1281), quoted by Hastings Rashdall in F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, eds., The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1 :2, n1, cf. 1 :23; and H. Grundmann, “Sacerdotium, Regnum, Studium: Zur Wertung der Wissenschaft im 13. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 34 (1952): 5–21. Walter Rüegg, “Themes,” in A History of the University in Europe, gen. ed. Walter Rüegg, Vol. 1, Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 22. Rainer Christoph Schwinges, “Student Education, Student Life,” in Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 201. Walter Rüegg, gen. ed., A History of the University in Europe, Vol. 2, Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. Walter Rüegg, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114. L. Boehm, “Humanistische Bildungsbewegung und mittelalterliche Universitätsverfassung,” in The Universities in the Late Middle Ages, ed. J. Ijsewijn and J. Paquet, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, series 1, studia 6 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1978), 324; cf. Rüegg, ed., Universities in Early Modern Europe, 34. Paolo Nardi summarizes the transition as the move “from studium generale to princely institution” in H. de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities in the Middle Ages, 102. H. de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities in the Middle Ages, 188–9. As a percentage of the population, the overall numbers were still quite small: In describing the oversupply, Schwinges estimates about 6,000 students annually in Europe around 1500. Maria Rosa di Simone offers a carefully detailed assessment of the statistics for individual countries between 1500 and 1800 in Rüegg, ed., Universities in Early Modern Europe, 297–311. H. de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities in the Middle Ages, 198, and Rüegg, ed., Universities in Early Modern Europe, 312–13. Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 264–5, 272–4. Schwinges, “Student Education, Student Life,” in H. de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities in the Middle Ages, 207. Woolfson, Padua, 39, 83. Ep. 128 in More, Correspondence, 301 ; cf. Mayer, Reginald Pole, 47. Woolfson, Padua, 17. In fact in his survey of sixteenth-century uses of the term, Paul Grendler argues that it denoted a professional teacher and scholar who often held a university position – and, by implication, he questions whether it can be used to describe people in earlier periods who were classical scholars but not teachers – like Petrarch, for example. In “The Concept of Humanist in Cinquecento Italy,” in A. Molho and J. Tedeschi, eds., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 445–64. Paul Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York: Harper, 1961), 160 n.61; and Augusto Campana, “The Origin of the Word ‘Humanist,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 9 (1946): 60–73, 66. Walter Rüegg, “Themes,” in Rüegg, ed., Universities, 38.



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53. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), and The Confessionalization of Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10. For cautions about overstating the differences between humanists and scholastics, see James Overfeld, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 330. 54. Many famous humanists did not have university degrees: Erasmus, for example, studied theology for a time at the university in Paris but did not take a degree. In support of the same point Ingrid Rowland observes that Angelo Colocci “could enter the first rank of humanist litterati without any university training whatsoever” (Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 11). 55. As Rowland says, in papal Rome the humanist who had no university training was “stimulated as much by the company he kept as by a course of formal instruction” (Rowland, High Renaissance, 11). 56. Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (1957, rev. ed. 1985, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), xv. For a defense of applying the modern, sociological category of “intellectuals” to medieval society, see G. Santini, Università e società nel XII secolo: Pilio da Medicina e lo Studio di Modena (Modena: STEM Mucchi, 1979): “The birth of ‘the intellectual’ as a new sociological type presupposes the division of urban labor just as the origin of university institutions presupposes a common cultural space where these new ‘cathedrals of knowledge’ could rise up, thrive, and confront each other freely” (112). On vocations, see Cobban, The Medieval Universities, 230. 57. For “existential” interpretations see William Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), and Mayer, Thomas Starkey, 278–86. For a survey and critique of traditional arguments about civic humanism in Italy, see Jerrold Seigel, “’Civic Humanism’ or Ciceronian Rhetoric? The Culture of Petrarch and Bruni,” Past and Present, 34 (1966), Hans Baron’s reply, Past and Present, 36 (1967), 21 –37, and (on humanism in England) Jonathan Woolfson, “Introduction” in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 58. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, xiii–xiv. 59. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128, 92. 60. H. de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities, 1 :452; For analogies between the poet as literary creator and the divine, see Robert Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Ullrich Langer argues that Durling makes too much of the divine analogy (Divine and Poetic Freedom, 21 n51). 61. Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” 92. 62. Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, and Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For a negative version of the same point, see Mayer’s observation that the Italian work, Beneficio



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di Christi, has been difficult to interpret because it was “written by men who thought poetic lusus as important as religion” (Mayer, Reginald Pole, 123; Mayer cites Anne Reynolds, Renaissance Humanism at the Court of Clement VII: Francesco Berni’s Dialogue against Poets in Context [New York: Garland Publishing, 1997]). Michael Seidlmayer analyzes humanism as a transformation of the monastic ideal in “Petrarca: Das Urbild des Humanisten,” in Wege und Wandlungen des Humanismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), 125–77. On Petrarch’s “professionalism,” see Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 35. Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 26. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Petrarch’s Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 10. Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario, ed. F. Novati (Rome: Forzani, 1891 –1911 ), 4:183–4, quoted in E. Rummel, Confessionalization of Humanism, 155n3. J. W. Saunders, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1951), 139–64. Mayer, Reginald Pole, 123. For Mayer this unstable mix reflects the tensions between burlesque, topical, and even pornographic poetry, which was popular among many of Pole’s contemporaries in Italy. He thereby raises important questions not dealt with in my argument; the ambivalence I am interested in arises among those who are not grappling with this sort of stark contrast between sacred and secular but instead a more nebulous issue of the relationship between piety and spiritual meaning, on the one hand, and status and social pragmatics, on the other. Woolfson, Padua, 104–6; Margaret King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 432–3. See Gigliola Fragnito, In museu e in villa: saggi sul Rinascimento perduto (Venice: Arsenale, 1988), for the argument that Bembo, along with Contarini and other contemporaries, created a way of life that synthesized contemplation and action – a way of life that disappeared within the lifetime of their disciple, Ludovico Beccadelli, in large part because of the influence of cardinal Carafa (later Pope Paul IV), who in 1539 responded to news that Bembo would become a cardinal by insisting “Holy Father, we have no need of men who write sonnets” (quoted in Fragnito, 29). Quote cited in William Bouwsma, Venice and the Defence of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 136. Printed in Daniella De Bellis, “La vita e l’ambiente di Niccolo` Leonico Tomeo,” Quaderni per la storia dell’università di Padova, 13 (1980): 37–75, 63–4; translated in Francis Gasquet, Cardinal Pole and His Early Friends (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1927), 24–7. Woolfson, Padua, 113. Pole, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli . . . [Libri], ed. Angelo Maria Querini (1744–57; facs. repr., Farnborough: Gregg, 1967) iii, 383, hereafter referred to as Pole, Epistolae. For the status of intellectuals in Renaissance society, see Adriano Prosperi, “Intellettuali e Chiesa, 159–252; and John Oppel, “Alberti on the Social Position of the Intellectual,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): 123–58. Kenneth Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998), 25–6.



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77. See Woolfson, Padua, 111, citing Longolius, Opera, fol. 119, 153. Longolius’s dying request is quoted in Thomas F. Mayer, A Reluctant Author: Cardinal Pole and His Manuscripts (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999), 92; cf. Pole, Calendar, Correspondence, no. 14. 78. Mayer, Reluctant Author, 91 –6, concludes that it was. 79. I owe the insight about the significance of Longolius’s frustrated request to Thomas Mayer (personal communication, December 2004). 80. Ep. 1595, CWE 11 :232–33, Allen 6:144. 81. Ep. 1627, CWE 11 :314, Allen 6:192. 82. On the increased importance of nobility, see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 83. Adriano Prosperi, “Intelletuali e Chiesa, 159–254; Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Knopf, 1979), 218–21. 84. Christian Bec, “Lo statuto socio-professionale degli scrittori (Trecento e Cinquecento),” in Letteratura italiana: produzione e consumo, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 255–57. 85. Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance, 24; cf. Ingrid Rowland’s vivid account of this period in Culture of the High Renaissance, 193–254. 86. Jacopo Sadoleto, Epistolae quotquot extant proprio nomine scriptae nunc primum duplo auctiores in lucem editae, ed. Vincenzo Costanzi, 5 vols. (Rome, 1760–67) 1 :175, following the translation in Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance, 116. 87. Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance, 122. 88. Sadoleto, Epistolae I:172, 283, 352; Cf. Richard Douglas, Jacopo Sadoleto, 1477–1547: Humanist and Reformer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 57. 89. Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance, 124. 90. Sadoleto’s pedagogical treatise is in his Opera, III, 66–126; there is an English translation: Sadoleto on Education: A Translation of the De pueris recte instituendis, trans. E. T. Campagnac and K. Forbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916). Cf. Douglas, Sadoleto, 1477–1547, 46. 91. Pole to Sadoleto, July 1533, Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xiii, 399: “sic etiam animorum portus multo tutior & tranquillior, Deo ipso, & eodem Dei filio duce & inventore, nobis apertus sit, quem antiqui ignorabant.” 92. Sadoleto to Pole, December 1532, Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xiv, 406. 93. Sadoleto to Pole, December 1534, Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xvii, 420: “Quod si decor ab oratione removendus sit, cur non idem etiam a moribus? non iis, dico, quibus inest virtus, quae ipsa quoque non alio fructu, et emolumento quam suo decore spectanda est, sed de eis loquor moribus, qui in gestu et omni motu corporis, ipsaque vocis, atque vultus conformatione liberali bene institutos homines ab agrestibus discernunt.” 94. See Jacopo Sadoleto, Elogio della Sapienza (De laudibus philosophiae) (Naples: R. Pironti, 1950), 80. 95. Pole to Sadoleto, October 1534, Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xvi, 410: Mayer notes that the letter, misdated by the editor, was written in September (Calendar, Correspondence, no. 70): “Sic mea scribendi ratio, quamdiu curae mihi fuit, etsi tenuiter semper, nec satis pure fluebat, tamen secum quoquo modo animi mei sensa ferebat, quae nunc, omissa pristina diligentia, ita exaruit, ut cum animi cogitationes ad amicos deferre



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conor, saepe me haerere sentiam, plerumque vero tanquam in sicco destitui, ut ultra progredi non possim. Quod quidem me pudet scribere. Sed quid facerem? Nosti genus studiorum meorum, quibus me iis proximis annis addixi, quam imperiosa ipsa sint, quam non facile aliorum studiorum societatem admittant.” 96. Pole to Sadoleto, October 1534, Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xvi, 412. 97. Pole to Sadoleto, October 1534, Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xvi, 412: “nec enim decorum videbatur, cum ad annos meos respicerem, et tenuitatem doctrinae, atque judicii agnoscenrem, hominem id aetatis, et literatissimum de literis, prudentissimum autem, de instituendo vitae genere admonere?” The importance of prudence is reflected in Pole’s disavowal of Machiavelli in a work that someone (not Pole) entitled “De prudentia et sapientia humana et ea quam per Christum humano generi misericordia dei sit revelata,” discussed in Mayer, Reginald Pole, 88–90; cf. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity.” 98. Pole to Sadoleto, October 1534, Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xvi, 411 : “Tu certe unus instar multorum esses: immo tu solus, si huc incumberes, totum negocium per te conficeres. Scio enim quantum judicio tuo, quantum literis, quantum amori tribuat Lazarus noster, ut vel sola authoritas tua quo velles, eum adduceret.” 99. Sadoleto to Pole, December 1532, in Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xiv, 403–04: “Neque aliter statuere poteram, quam eum, qui et nobilitate domi, et fortuna amplissimus, cognatos, familiares, patriamque reliquisset, et cum flagraret studio et amore artium optimarum, ex ultimis oris regionibusque terrarum, illarum adipiscendarum causa, in Italiam se contulisset, ibique annos complures commoratus, ita se dedisset familiaritatibus amicitiisque doctissimorum et praestantissimorum hominum, ut illorum omnium judicio imprimis dignus ipse haberetur, quem et propter fidem atque integritatem vitae venerarentur omnes, et propter ingenium doctrinamque colerent.” 100. Pole to Sadoleto, October 1534, in Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xvi, 409: “quippe qui mihi in visceribus, etiam antea quam de facie notus esses, haerebas, propter summam, quam de tua virtute et doctrina, ex dignissimorum hominum judicio, de te concepeream, opinionem. Ut vero tui propius cognoscendi facultas data est, atque ad illa interiora tua animi ornamenta penetrandi, quae partim in congressu, partim ex scriptis tuis, qualia essent facile perspexi, tanta me tui admiratio cepit, ut non modo te amandum mihi atque observandum, sed in omnibus et studiis et actionibus meis, quasi exemplar aliquod praeclarum, mihi imitandum proposuerim.” 101. Pole to Sadoleto, July 1533, Pole, Epistolae, ltr xv, 407: “Sed ego facile me ab omni illusmodi disputatione evolvo. Fateor enim plane, quaecumque dixerim de te, omnia fuisse amoris; se qui amor a vero & integro judicio profectus fuerit.” 102. Sadoleto to Pole, December 1532, Pole, Epistolae, ltr. xiv, 403. 103. Rummel, Humanist-Scholastic Debate and Confessionalization of Humanism. 104. A translation of this exchange appears in John C. Olin, ed., A Reformation Debate: Sadoleto’s Letter to the Genevans and Calvin’s Reply (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Quoted phrases appear on 31, 37. The Latin text is in John Calvin, Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, Corpus Reformatorum, 59 vols. (Brunswick, 1863–1900), Vol. 5, 369–416, quoted phrases on 371, 376. 105. J. C. Olin, ed., A Reformation Debate, 49. J. Calvin, Opera, 384. 106. Pole, De unitate, 133r; Defense, 329.



192 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116.

117.

118. 119.

120. 121.

122.

123.

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Pole, De unitate, 96r; Defense, 235. Mayer summarizes Pole’s use of Fisher and More in Reginald Pole, 26–8. Pole, De unitate; Defense, 163, 68. Pole, De unitate, 77r, cf. 114v; Defense, 187, cf. 279–80; on Pole’s role in persuading the theologians of Paris to support Henry, see Thomas F. Mayer, “A Fate Worse than Death: Reginald Pole and the Parisian Theologians,” English Historical Review 103 (1988): 870–91. Pole, De unitate, 11 r; Defense, 26. Pole, De unitate, 103v; Defense, 252. Pole, De unitate, 104v-r; Defense, 253. Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CWTM 6.1 :169. For the argument about glosses, see Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). Ep. 206, More, Correspondence, 515. Ep. 205, More, Correspondence, 511 –13. Cf. Germain Marc’hadour, “A Name for All Seasons.” Erasmus makes the connection by dedicating his Encomium moriae (The Praise of Folly) to More; three years before his death, More himself wrote a Latin quatrain that ends with the lines “Desine morari, et caelo meditare morari: Hoc te vel morus, More, monere potest” [Stop playing the fool and contemplate staying in heaven. Even a fool, More, can tell you that.]” Latin Poems (CWE, Vol. 3, Part 2, 302–3). Ep. 206, More, Correspondence, 514–32. Since this letter was first printed in the 1557 edition of More’s English writings there have been questions about whether it was actually written by Roper or by More himself. Many scholars have weighed in, but the most sensible assessment appears in Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106–7. Ep. 206, More, Correspondence, 528. For the conventional reading of More’s response to Alice’s letter as an affirmation of the primacy of the individual conscience, see Louis L. Martz, “The Tower Works,” in CWTM 12:lx–lxv. Mayer, Reginald Pole, 105. To compare this to the significance and actions of erudite Christian women in a later historical context, see F. Ellen Weaver, “Erudition, Spirituality, and Women: The Jansenist Contribution,” in Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds, ed. Sherrin Marshall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Pole, Epistolae, 4:339–40: “tunc enim cognovi . . . magis idoneum esse factum, id est, magis docilem ad perdiscendam eam, quam maxime optabam, Theologiam, non in scholis quidem hominum, hominibus magistris: sed in schola Dei, Deo ipso docente.” Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1939), 24; cf. Massimo Firpo, Tra Alumbrados e ‘Spirituali’: Studi su Juan de Valdes e il Valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa dell ‘500 italiano (Florence: Olschki, 1990), 16n23 and 13–43, esp. 28; and Susanna Peyronel Rambaldi, “Ancor sull’Evangelismo italiano: Categoria o invenzione storiografica?” Società e Storia 18 (1982): 935–67, 951.



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124. With an intriguing argument about Pole’s homosexuality, Mayer concludes that Pole’s “preferred sphere was private where he and a small group of friends could love one another without intrusions from politics or other public domains. Valuing private life represents a recent historiographical shift that gives a new meaning to his resistance” (Mayer, Reginald Pole, 451). For a different analysis about resistance see Mayer’s earlier work, “Nursery of Resistance: Reginald Pole and his Friends,” in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse, and Disguise, ed. Paul A. Fideler and T. F. Mayer (London: Routledge, 1992), 50–74. I discuss more fully how my argument differs from Mayer’s in Chapter 5. 125. Ep. 337 CWE 3:119. 126. The phrase is from Richard Hooker, cited in Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 274. Cf. Diane Willen, “Women and Religion in Early Modern England,” in Women in Reformation and Counter Reformation Europe, ed. Sherrin Marshall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 127. Peter Iver Kaufman, “Absolute Margaret,” 443–56, esp. 451. 128. When Pole became cardinal, for example, he wrote to his friends, including perhaps Colonna, to assure them that the promotion was not due to his ambition (cited in Mayer, Reginald Pole, 46).

chapter 3: the spiritual quest 1. Ltr. 22 in Gasparo Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, ed. Hubert Jedin (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1953), 59. Jedin reprinted this collection of letters in Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 2 (1959): 59–118. 2. Vittoria Colonna, Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Bari: Laterza, 1982), S1 :46: tal io, qualor il caldo raggio e vivo/ del divin Sole onde nudrisco il core/ piu` de l’usato lucido lampeggia,/ movo la penna, mossa da l’amore/ interno, e senza ch’io stessa m’aveggia/ di quel ch’io dico le Sue lodi scrivo. 3. On Contarini’s life and thought see Elisabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Gigliola Fragnito, Gasparo Contarini: un magistrato veneziano al servizio della cristianità (Florence: Olschki, 1988); and Felix Gilbert, “Religion and Politics in the Thought of Gasparo Contarini,” in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe, ed. Theodore Rabb and Jerrold Seigel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 90–116. 4. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 57–8. 5. James Hankins, Plato in the Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 1 : 8–17. 6. The quote is from Abigail Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” Italian Studies 57 (2002): 61 –74, 69. Cf. Amadeo Quondam, Il naso di Laura: Lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del Classicismo (Ferrara: Panini, 1991 ), 263– 89, for a bibliography of spiritual poetry, and Giovanna Rabitti, “Lyric Poetry, 1500–1650,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, ed. Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37–51, for the argument that Counter-Reformation repression pushed women to write spiritual poetry. Rinaldina



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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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Russell extends the connections toward England when she mentions the corollaries between Colonna’s work and what Louis Martz called the “poetry of meditation,” and explains that Colonna differs from the later poets because she does not write of stages of meditation: Russell, “The Mind’s Pursuit of the Divine: A Survey of Secular and Religious Themes in Vittoria Colonna’s Sonnets,” Forum Italicum 26.1 (1992): 14–27, 27 n13. Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 27–30; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); and Andrew Taylor, “Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval England,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 42. William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 38, 50; Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study, 8–12, 175–178); and Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations 50 (1995): 76–100. Letters and graphic evidence reveal that at least some women – including aristocrats, courtesans, and bourgeoisie women – had studies, but it is difficult to know how many there were because the inventories that are the best sources for quantitative evidence list all possessions under the name of the man who owned the home (Thornton, The Scholar in His Study, 90–97. Mark Wigley explores the gendered implications of the closet or private study for early modern subjectivity in “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), esp. 347–9. Richard Rambuss nicely underscores the diverse (“heterotopic”) possibilities of private devotional space, following Foucault, who observes “There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places . . . which are something like countersites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Rambuss, Closet Devotions, 107–8; Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 [1986]: 22–7). Millard Meiss, “Scholarship and Penitence in the Early Renaissance: The Image of St. Jerome,” Pantheon 32.2 (1974): 134–40; ibid., “French and Italian Variations on an Early Fifteenth-Century Theme: St. Jerome and His Study,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 105.2 (1963): 147–70; Bernard Ridderbos, Saint and Symbol: Images of Saint Jerome in Early Italian Art (Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhuis, 1984), 15–40, 63–88; Eugene F. Rice, Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Boston: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 87–9, 104–8. For the studious Jerome see especially Dürer’s engravings, Complete Engravings: Etchings of Albrecht Durer, ed. Walter L. Strauss (New York: Dover, 1972) nos. 8, 56, 77. E. Fahy, “A Portrait of a Renaissance Cardinal as St. Jerome,” Bulletin of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts LIX (1970): 5ff., discussed in Millard Meiss, “Scholarship and Penitence,” 135–40, 140. On the traditions linking reading and emotion see Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). There’s an ongoing debate about the depth and effect of the Venetian sense of crisis. Margaret King gives a brief overview of the arguments while emphasizing that it



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intensified long-term trends in Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) 237–8 nn81 –84. And on the question of crisis in Italy see Christian Bec, ed., Italie 1500–1550: une situation de crise? (Lyon: Editions L’Hermès, 1975) and Stella Fletcher and Christine Shaw, eds., The World of Savonarola: Italian Elites and Perceptions of Crisis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). James Bruce Ross, “Contarini and His Friends,” Studies in the Renaissance 17 (1970): 192–232, 206 n56, and on his involvement in battle, 205 n51, citing Sanudo, Diarii ix, cols. 146, 204–10, and xii, cols. 327, 323, and xxi, col. 85. Contarini to Giustiniani and Querini, 17 July 1512, ltr. 11 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli 37: Sapeti ambedui come io questi tre anni adrieto, dapoi che per le guerre me transfer`ı dal studio patavino a Venetia, et con vui presi piu` strecta amicitia che per lo adietro havevo, sempre hebbi questo pensiero di fornir quelli studii de philosophia humana a li quali haveveo ià data bona opera, et poi trasferirme a la doctrina christiana et in quella con quiete passar in timor de Dio li mei anni. Elisabeth Gleason notes that since Jedin’s discovery of these letters they have become nearly a “subtopic of sixteenth-century Italian history.” For references see E. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 12 n43. I thank Clark Gilpin for clarity on this point. The Libellus ad Leonem X (1513) can be found in J. B. Mittarelli and A. Costadoni, eds., Annales Camaldulenses, 9 vols. (Venice, 1755–73; facs. repr. Farnsborough: Gregg Press, 1970), 9:612–719. For an analysis of context and content see Stephen D. Bowd, Reform Before the Reformation: Vicenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 87 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), 136–8, 149–60, 167–73. 12 March 1512, Annales Camaldulenses, 9:559, 552. “tal vita era piu` tosto da Gentile filosofo, che da un religioso animo Cristiano; nella quale non vera annegazione del Mondo, non mortificazione della propria volontà, non virtu` di obbedienza, non vera povertà, bens`ı innumerabili pericoli della castità” (20 July 1518, Annales Camaldulenses, 9:595). I use this and the following examples to underscore the connection between reading and identity, but this sort of rhetoric is traditionally analyzed as part of the debate about the relative merits of the contemplative and active life: On this see Giuseppe Alberigo, “Vita attiva e vita contemplativa in un’esperienza cristiana del XVI secolo,” Studi veneziani 16 (1974): 177–227, 182 n9 and Gigliola Fragnito, “Cultura umanistica e riforma religiosa: il ‘De officio boni viri ac probi episcopi’ di Gasparo Contarini,” Studi veneziani 11 (1969): 75–189, 93. Margaret King provides examples of similar rhetoric in fifteenth-century Venice (Venetian Humanism, 35). Margaret King and Albert Rabil, Jr., Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 20 (Binghampton, New York: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1983), 102–3; cf. Craig Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 199. Contarini went to a humanist grammar school and then to a school of logic and philosophy in Rialto; in Padua he studied with the Aristotelian philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi, who became controversial when he argued that Aristotelian logic could not support some doctrines of Christian faith. Contarini wrote a critical response to Pomponazzi’s work, On the Immortality of the Soul (Gasparis Contareni



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25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

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33.

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Cardinalis Opera [Paris, 1571 ], 179–209. See E. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 76–80). On Pomponazzi see Martin L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance (Padua: Antenore, 1986). Although students in fact spent most of their time methodically learning Latin grammar and pronunciation and memorizing the definitions of rhetorical categories, their teachers successfully maintained that they were being trained in moral philosophy – shaped and molded into virtuous citizens who would reflect with sober good judgment, declaim with inspiring eloquence, and act with courageous restraint for the good of the polis. On the claims for education’s moral value and the reality of the student’s daily grind see Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 2–3, 125, 134–49; Mary Crane, Framing Authority, 57; Paul Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 263–4; and Margaret King, Venetian Humanism, 27–38. See p74, above. De pueris recte instituendis (1530), appears in Sadoleto, Opera, III, 66–126; for the English translation see Sadoleto on Education: A Translation of the De pueris recte instituendis, trans. E. T. Campagnac and K. Forbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916). Ltr. 3 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 17: Ma, a dirve il vero del fato mio, me par che . . . sappia molto ben dir et scriver, ma operar io minime nequaquam, et ogni ` nè pero` mai me dispono pur a giorno dico infra mi medesmo: Ben una volta faro, operar. Ltr. 4 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 18: El viver et l’esser mio de qui e` ne li studii, sforzandome di expedirme da questi studii humani per poterme poi transferir a quelli ne li quali ho proposto di versar sempre. Ltr. 7 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 25: Ho compito di veder quel che voleva de l’Almagesto et, per expedirve in pocche parole, son expedito di veder quel che me haveva ià assai tempo proposto di veder in questi studi humani. Et e` venuto el tempo che, secundo lo antiquo mio desiderio, son per darme tuto a la Scritura Sacra. Ltr. 7 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli 25: rivedendo qualche coseta di questi altri studii maxime per giovar a quelli doi giovani che sappeti in questo usano la mia opera. Ltr. 7 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli 25. Ho comenciato a veder li Libri de Salomone per esser molto morali, et ho comenzo li Proverbi, libro excelentissimo. Et cus`ı, per mio piacer, cercando di lassar in tuto la mia solita anxietade nel studio, son per andar dietro a vedendo, non per imparar et per sapper, come principal fin, ma per emendar la mia vita et per accender questo mio frigidissimo pecto. “Varie notizie della vita del card. Contarini” in Gigliola Fragnito, Memoria individuale e costruzione biografica: Beccadelli, Della Casa, vettori alle origini di un mito, Pubblicazioni dell’Università di Urbino, serie di lettere e filosofia (Urbino: Argal`ıa, 1978), 181. Robert Boyle, Works, ed. Thomas Birth, 6 vols. (London, 1772), I, xvi–xvii, composed ca. 1647–1648; quoted in Adrian Johns, “The Physiology of Reading Restoration England,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 139. Ltr. 11 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 37. Fornito che io hebbi quel studio, ` a non so che modo, uno altro de le mathematice, et de la theologia me ne subintro,



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35.

36.

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38.

39.

40.

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de San Thomaso, ma praecipue de le mathematice, a le quale per do anni continui ho dato assidua opera, insieme con la theologia di San Thomaso. Ltr. 11 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 37: Hora fornito el studio da me proposto et venuto el desiderato tempo, credo per la anxietà usata questo passato anno in quelli predicti studii, son incorso in quella disposition melancholica ch ià sapeti che io pat`ı grandissima. Ltr. 11 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 37: Me son venuti in odio li studii, et quella sol cosa che a l’altra volta mi ralegrava, cioè la lection de la Scriptura Sacra, hora me dà grande molestia. Ltr. 12 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 39: et vivome in questa sorte di vita humile et bassa nè da esser comparata non dico a la vostra ma a quella dil forzo de’ saeculari, dandome a studii humani et di quelli prendendo qualche spasso cognoscendo et vedendo che el stomacho mio debile non e` sufficiente di digerir que solido cibo de le sacre lettere. Ltr. 2 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli 15: se seremmo pur un poccho con lo affecto acostato a lui, non besogna molta altra satisfaction, perchè lui a` satisfato ex visceribus charitatis per amor nostro. Ltr. 8 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 27: Ma sempre sempre, che a tal impresa son messo, et indispositione grande nel corpo per questo humore melancholico et perturbation grande ne l’animo mi e` risultata. Ltr. 8 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 27: Et pure ultimamente, dopoi che la febre quartana non mi dava piu` noia, me havevo messo a leggere lo Evangelio di san Matheo et qualche cosa di sancto Gregorio et sancto Agustino, quando, oltre la indispositione del corpo, mi sentiva nascere per quelle lectione alguni timori ` pure, benchè li cognoscessi essere vani, mi davano ne l’animo, vani et pazzi pero; grandissima perturbatione. Ltr. 8 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 28: Quelle altre cose de li theologi piu` vecchi, li quali sempre in interpretatione mystice de la Scriptura over in admonitione di uno modo di vivere et di uno affecto di animo, al qual non posso inalzarme, la debellezza mia non sostene, immo, se io in quelle cose verso, di timore in discontento et di discontento in timore ritorno. Ibid.: Per tanto . . . spento da una inclinatione interiore, la quale credo sia di sopra, ho deliberato quelle cose cus`ı alte havere in reverentia et veneratione, ma el studio mio mettere in queste cose piu` basse, perchè la luce di quelle la mia debile vista non sostene. Quoted in Benedicta Ward, “Introduction,” in The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm (London: Penguin, 1973) 43–4. The most compelling survey of monastic reading practices is still in Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), 18–22, 89– 93, although the same topic is assessed more theoretically in Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400–1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Uiversity Press, 1964), 28–9, and Pierre Riché, Les écoles et l’enseignement dans l’occident chrétien de la fin du Ve siècle au milieu du Xie siècle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1979), 161 –3.



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43. Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 230–3; Paul Saenger, “Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 141 –5. 44. Augustine, Soliloquii di Sancto Agostino (Florence, 1489), 1 r. 45. Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, critical edition, ed. Michael G. Sargent, Garland Medieval Texts, New York: Garland Publishing, 1992, 12–13 (modernized). As Giles Constable notes, a new genre of spiritual literature emerged in the twelfth century, and was disseminated both in Latin and in the vernacular (Giles Constable, “The Popularity of Twelfth Century Spiritual Writers in the Late Middle Ages,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi [Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1971 , 3–28]). Goldschmidt describes a “vogue” for mystical contemplation among clerics and laymen, so compelling that “it resulted in the publication of practically every work in this class which we now consider to be of importance or value” (E. Ph. Goldschmidt, Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print, Supplement to the Bibliographical Society’s Transactions, 16 [London: Bibliographical Society, 1943], 51). 46. Thus the emphasis on eloquence. See Hankins, Plato in the Renaissance, 1 :100. Carol Quillen suggests that the humanists devalued the pursuit of truth because they took for granted that it was readily accessible: Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 221. 47. Ltr. 8 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 27: et che per adeso di quella moralità, la qual li philosophi hanno vista con el lume naturale, el qual e` etiam dono grande di Dio, me debba contentare, et in quelle speculatione basse de philosophi et theologi, che solum insegnano, zioè sancto Thomaso, mi debba contentare. Et questa via et questo debile lume a l’animo mio quadra. Note that although Jedin dates Letter 8 to 1512, I concur with Elisabeth Gleason’s persuasive argument that it should follow Letter 13 and be dated 1514 (Gleason, Contarini, 22 n99). 48. Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages, (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 2; Contarini to Querini and Giustiniani, 26 November 1513, ltr. 13 in Contarini und Camaldoli 42: Io de qui, honorandissimi mei Padri, vivo con li nostri amici in li studi. 49. Ltr. 13 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 42: Incominciai già pochi goirni a veder quella excelentissima opera di Augustino: De Trinitate, la qual leggo con grandissima iucundità di animo. Leggo etiam quel de Republica di Platone, el qual hora e` stato impresso ne la sua lingua. 50. Fragnito, Gasparo Contarini, 120. 51. Ltr. 8 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 28: li mei studii ne li quali posso dire consistere la summa del viver mio. As noted in n47, this letter was written after Letters 11 and 13. 52. E. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 29. 53. Contarini, Letter of 25 April 1521, in Regesten und Briefe des Cardinals Gasparo Contarini 1483–1542, ed. Franz Dittrick (Braunsberg, 1881), 252 (Inedita, no. 1), quoted in E. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 27.



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54. Felix Gilbert similarly notes that all of Contarini’s works deal with the same theoretical concerns and that “love has a central place in his theoretical system” (“Religion and Politics in the Thought of Gasparo Contarini,” 107). But Gilbert is interested in how Contarini resolved the conflict between political and religious life, whereas I think this focus on the perennial vita activa/vita contemplativa debate obscures the religious and social significance of the concerns Contarini has about reading and writing – and his related theoretical interest in the intellect and the affect. For instance, Gilbert argues that Contarini’s work about the ideal bishop (De officio episcopi) was animated by “one assumption . . . that behind every existence and every status there is an idea which is an outgrowth of the divine spirit and which man, by his own innate goodness, is drawn to realize. Thus, every activity, if it is moving in the direction of perfection, is hallowed” (109). But this was precisely the question Contarini returned to over and over again: What hallows an activity? How is one drawn to realize the idea that emanates from God? 55. Contarini, Quattro lettere di monsignor Gasparo Contarino (Florence, 1558), 10: Onde avviene, ch’essendo Dio vero, et buono, si pervegna ad esso piu tosto con la volontà, che con l’intelletto, conciosia cosa, ch’è il vero, cosi obietto dell intelletto, come’è il Buono, obietto della volontà? 56. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 16: Io non voglio hora discutere quale di queste due opinioni, sia piu vera. Ben ne voglio aggiungere una terza, a mio giuditio, piu vera di amendue queste, tocca da Dionisio nel suo libro de Divinis nominibus. 57. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 17: Cioè, transcende ogni operation sua; l’operation dello intelletto, l’operation della volontà, me e` absorto nell Requie, nella Verità, et essere Divino. His Scriptural citations include 2 Corinthians 2; John 17; and Hebrews 4. 58. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 19: che se la Felicità consiste nell’operatione perfetta dello Intelletto, a` quest diveniamo per la via dell’Amore piu perfettamente, che per la via delle Scientie. Cf. Gilbert, “Religion and Politics” 107. 59. On how pseudo-Dionysius’s many interpreters read him differently, see Pauline Watts, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Three Renaissance Neoplatonists: Cusanus, Ficino, and Pico on Mind and Cosmos,” in Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. James Hankins, John Monfasani, and Frederick Purnell, Jr. (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 279–98. 60. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 29: Virtu` Morale . . . in tanto e` buona, et perfetta, in quanto seguita il dettame della ragion retta. 61. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 30: Le virtu` Morali sono ordinate a` comprimere i moti inordinate dell’appetito del senso, accio non perturbi la ragione, et lo intelletto; accio possa senza perturbatione operar quello, ch’allui conviene, cioè, contemplare e speculare. 62. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 33: Imperoche nella essecution d’ogni operatione, di qualunque altra potential, la Volonà e` la patrona, e dalla quale, ogni altra potential dell’anima, e` mossa a` essequire la sua operatione. Non caminiamo se non vogliamo. Ne mangiamo. Ne si porremo allo speculare, e contemplare, se nonvogliamo. 63. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 35. 64. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 40. 65. E. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 86; cf. the dedicatory letter to Giustiniani, preface to the Compendium primae philosophiae, and to Matteo Dandolo, preface to



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66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

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the De elementis et eorum mixtionibus libri V (both in Contarini, Opera, 93–176 and 1 –90). Ltr. 8 in Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 28: la summa del viver mio. Io, per la gratia de dio son sano et vivo lat vita mia consueta cum li amici, et quando mi avancia il tempo, cum qualche libro christianio, sforzandomi de attingere a qualche cognitione della doctrina et vita christiana, da quale quanto piu ne lego, tando piu mi pare essere lontano, et vivere quasi adormentato et agelato, ne ritrovo perho via di svegliarmi et accendermi sin hora, se non per la sperancia che ho in la benignita divina la quale alhora prepara il modo di fortificare, svegliare et accendere l’homo, quando esso e` ben capace della sua debolezza et infirmita, la quale da per lui non puo superare et sanare. Quoted in E. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 137 n42, from Contarini’s letter to Benedetto Accolti, 1 Jan. 1536, in Archivio di Stato, Florence, Carteggio Accolti, Filza 12, inserto 13, fol. 154r. As Gleason notes, an innacurate and incomplete version of this letter is in Contarini, Regesten und Briefe des Cardinals Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), ed. Franz Dittrich (Braunsberg, 1881), 263 (Inedita, no. 11). “Del libero arbitrio,” in Contarini, Quattro lettere. It is reprinted in Vittoria Colonna, Carteggio, 441 –54; the Latin version is in Contarini, Opera, 597–604. On Colonna see the recent catalogue prepared for an exhibit at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which includes numerous short articles and a good bibliography: Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, ed., Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos (Vienna: Skira, 1997). See also the entry in Giorgio Patrizi, Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960–), 27:448–57. On her involvement in reform movements, see Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali’: Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 24 (1988): 211 –61, and Sergio M. Pagano and Concetta Ranieri, Nuovi Documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole (Vatican City: Archivio Vaticano, 1989). Still useful is Maud F. Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna, with Some Account of Her Friends and Her Times (1906), Select Bibliographies Reprint Series (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969). From a report to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, 18 Nov. 1538; quoted in Aldo Stella, “La lettera del Cardinale Contarini sulla predestinazione,” Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia 15 (1961): 416 n22. Contarini, Quattro lettere, 73–74 (also in Colonna, Carteggio 452–454). Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A1 :13: Ristretta in loco oscuro, orrido e solo,/ ascosa, e cinta dal proprio martire,/ legati i sensi tutti al bel pensero,// con veloce expedito altero volo/ unir la mente al mio sommo desire/ oggi e` quanto di ben nel mondo spero. Filonico Alicarnasseo, Vita di Vittoria Colonna, printed as an appendix in Colonna, Carteggio, 487–518, quote on 499. Joseph Gibaldi, “Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman, and Poet,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987) 22–46, 24. An updated bibliography can be found at http://home.infionline.net/∼ddisse/colonna.html. Deanna Shemek, Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) Ch. 1. Benedetto Nicolini, “Sulla religiosità di Vittoria Colonna,” in Ideali e passioni nell’Italia religiosa del cinquecento (Bologna: Libreria antiquaria Palmaverde, 1962), 34–5. He surmises that in her scriptural studies Colonna concentrated on the New Testament and the Gospels in particular, and among the Gospels, she cited John



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77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

85. 86. 87.

88.

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most often. Because her poems contain almost no references to Pauline writings, Nicolini argues that she found Paul confusing. On the poem to her husband see Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A2:1, 53–6, discussed in Giovanna Rabitti, “Vittoria Colonna as Role Model for Cinquecento Women Poets,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000), 478–97, 480–2. The sources praising her are cited in Gibaldi, “Vittoria Colonna” 24 nn2, 3. Colonna, Carteggio, 24. On Colonna and Sannazzaro see Concetta Ranieri, “Premesse umanistiche alla religiosità di Vittoria Colonna,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 32 (1996): 531 –48, 533 n6. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, E15. C. Dionisotti, “Appunti sul Bembo e su Vittoria Colonna,” in Miscellanea Augusto Campana (Padua: Antenore, 1981 ), 257–86. Bembo dedicated sonnets 125–7 to Colonna (in Pietro Bembo, Prose e Rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti, 2d ed., [Turin: UTET, 1966]). Bembo addressed many sonnets to writers and poets he deemed his disciples, but as Kennedy points out, he addressed more than one sonnet to two people only: Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara (William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994], 116.) In a 1530 letter to Paolo Giovio, Bembo said Colonna’s work “è grave, e` gentile, e` ingegnosa, et e` insomma eccellentemente e pensata e disposta e dettata” (Pietro Bembo, Opere in volgari [Florence: Sansoni, 1961 ], 684). Cf. his discussion of stylistic standards in Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua IX.2. The best discussion of how the intellectual culture in Naples influenced Colonna is Ranieri, “Premesse umanistiche”. Carlo Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 190–93. See now Ann Jones’s subtle study of how ideologies developed throughout Europe variously encouraged and sanctioned women who wrote (Ann Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990], 28–35). The three editions of 1539 are the first to announce on the title page that the spiritual poems were different from the “amorous” sonnets: Abigail Brundin, “Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” 62. The division is maintained in Bullock’s edition: there are two sections of rime amorose (141 poems in all) preceding the two sections of rime spirituali (217 poems in all), and at the end of the book, a collection of 32 poems the editor labels rime epistolari (Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock). For the publication history of the sonnets, see Bullock’s edition, 258–70. O. B. Hardison, Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 17. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Hardison, Enduring Monument, 7. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A1 :1 : Giusta cagion a lamentar m’invoglia;/ ch’io scemi la sua gloria assai mi dole;/ per altra tromba e piu` sagge parole/ convien ch’a morte il gran nome si toglia. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A1 :1 : Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia / ch’al cor mandar le luci al mondo sole, / e non per giunger lume al mio be Sole, / al chiaro



202

89.

90. 91. 92.

93.

94.

95.

96.

97.

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spirto e a l’onorata spoglia. // Giusta cagion a lamentar m’invoglia; / ch’io scemi la sua gloria assai mi dole; / per altra tromba a piu` sagge parole / convien ch’a morte il gran nome si toglia//La pura fe’, l’ardor, l’intensa pena/ mi scusi appo ciascun; ché ‘l grave pianto/ e` tal che tempo né ragion l’affrena.// Amaro lacrimar, non dolce canto,/ foschi sospiri e non voce serena, / di stil no ma di duol mi danno vanto. The parallel is drawn by Marcia Weston Brown, “Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, and Louise Labè: Their Contribution to the Developement of the Renaissance Sonnet” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1991 ), 67. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A1 :71 : Potess’io almen mandar nel vostro petto / l’ardor ch’io sento, o voi nel mio l’ingegno / per far la rima a quel gran merto equale. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A1 :14 Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A1 :25: Maggior miracol fia, piu` altera impresa /di trasportarmi al Ciel con mortal velo/ ch’indur con umil forma in terra i dei.// Ma se d’alto desir la mente accesa/ vaneggia, astretta d’amoroso zelo, / porgi tua forza ardir ai pensier miei. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A1 :36: Né piu` constante cor, né men ardente,/ piu` dolce suon, o men vivo desire,/ potran darmi già mai cotanto ardire/ ch’a s`ı dubbia speranza erga la mente;// né mi convien fra la perduta gente/ cercar rimedio al mio grave martire,/ né tranquillar là giu` gli sdegni e l’ire; / molto e` ‘l mio Sol da lor tenebre absente. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A1 :36: Ma se giova sperar in debil arte,/ di Fetonte l’ardir, d’Icar le piume,/ instrumenti sarian al mio mal degni// da condurmi vicino a quella parte/ ove soggiorna il mio fulgente lume,/ perch’ei poi modo a miglior vol m’insegni. Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, xiv.7, excerpted in A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100–c. 1375. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 422, reprinted from Boccaccio on Poetry, tr. C. G. Osgood. For Boccaccio on facultas see Minnis and Scott, 388. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :1 Poi che ‘l mio casto amor gran tempo tenne / l’alma di fama accesa, ed ella un angue / in sen nudrio, per cui dolente or langue / volta al Signor, onde il rimedio venne,// i santi chiodi omai sieno mie penne, / e puro inchiostro il prezioso sangue,// vergata carta il sacro corpo exangue, / s`ı ch’io scriva per me quel ch’Ei sostenne.//Chiamar qui non convien Parnaso o Delo, / ch’ad altra acqua s’aspira, ad altro monte/ si poggia, u’piede uman per sé non sale;/ quel Sol ch’alluma gli elementi e ‘l Cielo / prego, ch’aprendo il Suo lucido fonte / mi porga umor a la gran sete equale. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :45: Cieco e` ‘l nostro voler, vane son l’opere, cadono al primo vol le mortai piume senza quel di Gesu` fermo sostegno. (As McAuliffe points out, Colonna uses the word “penne” in the same way – to refer to both pens and wings: Dennis McAuliffe, “Neoplatonism in Vittoria Colonna’s Poetry: From the Secular to the Divine,” in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Olga Zorzi Pugliese [Ottawa, Canada: Dovehouse Editions, 1986] 106.) Ossola cites this poem as evidence of Colonna’s stance on the sixteenth-century debate about works and faith, but I think it should also be read as evidence of her perspective on questions about the boundaries between humanity and divinity that underlay the more explicit theological debates about justification: Carlo Ossola, Juan de Valdés, Lo evangelio di San Matteo, Bibliotecca del Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1985), 86.



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98. S`ı, ch’io scriva ad altrui quel ch’ei sostenne: cited by Brundin, “Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” 71 and n35 from Codice Vat. Lat. II539, Sonnet I, fol. Iv. 99. Concetta Ranieri, “Premesse umanistiche” 534 n6, citing Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :94. 100. Egidio is also known as Giles of Viterbo. Francis X. Martin O.S.A., Friar, Reformer, and Renaissance Scholar: Life and Work of Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532) (Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1992). A preacher who filled his sermons with classical allusions and characters, Giles was also one who insisted that he preached Christ crucified after the example of the Apostle (John W. O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform: A Study in Renaissance Thought, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, Vol. 5 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968), 69. 101. Elisabeth Gleason, “The Capuchin Order in the Sixteenth Century,” in Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation: In Honor of John C. Olin on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. Richard L. De Molen (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 36–7. 102. Colonna to Ercole d’Este, 26 March 1538, Carteggio, 157, cited in Massimo Firpo, Inquisizione romana e controriforma: Studi sul cardinale Giovanni Morone e il suo processo d’eresia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), Ch. 2. On Colonna’s relationship with Ochino see Alfred von Reumont, Vittoria Colonna, marchesa di Pescara: Vita, fede e poesia nel secolo decimosesto, trans. Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Muller, 2nd ed., (Turin, 1892), 151 –72, and Emidio Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna: Un dialogo artistico-teologico ispirato da Bernardino Ochino e altri saggi di storia della Riforma (Turin: Claudian, 1994), 21 –54. 103. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :36, cf. Domenico Tordi, Il Codice Della Rime di Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, Appartenuto a Margherita d’Angoulême, Regina di Navarra, Scoperto ed Illustrato (Pistoia: Lito-Tipografia G. Flori, 1900). 104. Maria Luisa Doglio, “L’occhio interiore e la scrittura nelle ‘Litere’ di Vittoria Colonna’, in Omaggio a Gianfranco Folena, 3 vols. (Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1993), ii, 1001 –13 (1004 for Catherine ref). 105. Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, and Firpo, Inquisizione Romana, 119– 74. 106. Ltr. 142, Carteggio, 240. 107. Manzoni, G., ed., “Estratto del processo di Pietro Carnesecchi,” Miscellanea di storia italiana 10 (1870): 187–551, 196, 535. 108. CWE 39:419–447; ASD 1 –3 364. 109. Ochino has long been recognized as a main target of the Inquisition (see, for example, the traditional account in Salvatore Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth Century Italy, trans. Ann C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi, Sixteenth Century Studies and Essays [Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1999]), 43. The fact that Ochino’s flight in August of 1542 – the same week Contarini died – was long accepted as a crisis for evangelical types. On this see Gigliola Fragnito, “Gli ‘spirituali’ e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino,” Rivista storica italiana 84 (1972): 777–813, and Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Periodization of Sixteenth-Century Italian Religious History: The Post-Cantimori Paradigm Shift,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 269–84. Valdés’s influence has been emphasized more recently by Massimo Firpo in particular. See, for example, Firpo, Riforma protestante ed eresie nell’Ialia del Cinquecento: Un profilo storico (Rome



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and Bari: Laterza, 1993). Adriano Prosperi skillfully demonstrates that they were only players in a much larger story in his studies of how the Inquisition sought to become a “tribunal of conscience” for the whole of Italian society. On this see Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza: Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 39–46, and L’Inquisizione Romana: letture e richerche, Storia e letteratura raccolta di studi e testi 214 (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003). Rita Belladonna, “Introduction,” in Seven Dialogues of Barnardino Ochino, trans. Rita Belladonna, Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, 3 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1988), xviii–xxiii. The most frequently cited indicator of Pole and Colonna’s attitudes about heretical theology is his advice to her to “believe as if she should be saved through faith alone, and on the other hand try to act as if her salvation consisted in works” (Manzoni, ed., “Estratto del processo di Pietro Carnesecchi,” in Miscellanea di storia italiana 10 (1870): 187–551, quote on 268). Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole, 132–3, 168–9, 176, underscores the complexity of the story about how and why Colonna and Pole were investigated and cites key sources. Cf. Pagano and Ranieri, Nuovi documenti. Mayer, Reginald Pole, 116–20. Barry Collett argues that the Benedictine influence on grace and mercy originated within the order, in part because of the influence of Greek Christian thought: Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :64: senza ombra che vi formi il chiaro e scuro/ ma pur vivo splendor del Sol celeste/ che le adorna, incolora, ordina e veste,/ d’intorno a Dio col mio pensier figuro;//. . . . . la cui beltà non mai vivo pensero/ ombrar poteo, non che ritrar memoria/ in carte, e men lodarla ingegno in rima. Rinaldina Russell, “The Mind’s Pursuit of the Divine: A Survey of Secular and Religious Themes in Vittoria Colonna’s Sonnets,” Forum Italicum 26.1 (1992): 14– 27, 23 n16. Letter 219 in Catherine of Siena, Le lettere di S. Caterina da Siena, ed. Piero Misciatelli (Florence: Giunti, 1940), Vol. 3, 268: “E crescendo in me il fuoco, mirando vedevo nel costato di Cristo intrare ‘l popolo e lo infedele: e io passavo, per desiderio e affetto d’amore, per lo mezzo di loro; ed entravo con loro in Cristo dolce Gesu` . . . E allora mi dava la croce in collo e l’olivo in mano, quasi come io volessi, e cos`ı diceva, che io la portassa all’uno popolo e all’altro. E diceva a me: ‘Di’ a loro: io vi annunzio guadio magno.” Marilyn Migiel, “Gender Studies and the Italian Renaissance,” in Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives, ed. Antonio Toscano (Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 1991 ), 29–41, 32. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :65: Or quando fia che l’alma in quel soggiorno/ segua il pensier, che tanto in su s’extende/ che spesso quel che ‘n Ciel piglia non rende/ a la memoria poi nel suo ritorno? Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, A2:51 : Fuor di me tutto in quello entra il mio core / dove questi occhi miei li aprir la via, / e quando dal mio seno egli già uscia / alto gridai: “Dove il conduci, Amore?”; A2:15: Ma se potesse l’alta sua sembianza / formar quant’ella vuol l’accesa mente / parte avrei forse qui del ben perfetto.



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119. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :46: tal io, qualor il caldo raggio e vivo/ del divin Sole onde nudrisco il core/ piu` de l’usato lucido lampeggia,/ movo la penna, mossa da l’amore/ interno, e senza ch’io stessa m’aveggia/ di quel ch’io dico le Sue lodi scrivo. 120. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :164: Che giova il volger di cotante carte? / . . . col cor li sente / colui che poco studia e molto crede. 121. Alexander Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” Art Bulletin 79.4 (December 1997) 647–69, 661 –4. This argument is also part of Nagel’s book, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 122. Colonna, Vittoria, Pianto sopra la Passione di Cristo, following the translation in Nagel, “Gifts,” 663. 123. Colonna, Pianto, following the English translation in Nagel, “Gifts,” 663–4. 124. Brundin, “Poetry of Reform” nn15, 25 and idem, “Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” 61 –81, 68, 70. 125. Colonna, Carteggio, 292–4, ltr. clxviii: et sopra tutto ti prego ti sforzi veder come la singularissima patrona e regina nostra Maria il mirabil mistero dell’altissimo Verbo [ha] incarnato in lei, et come si liquefa di divino ardore di veder la sua istessa carne fatta un vivo eterno sole. 126. Colonna, Carteggio, 299; Brundin, “Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” 79. 127. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :165: Con quella scrota ella se ‘n va sospesa,// s`ı che se giunge al desiato fine//passa per lungo e dubbioso sentero;//ma con quest sovente, da divine// luci illustrate e dib el foco accesa, // corre certa e veloce al segno vero. 128. Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, S1 :165: doi modi abbiam da veder l’alte e care//grazie del Ciel: l’uno e` guardando spesso// le sacre carte ov’è quell Lume expresso//ch’a l’occhio vivo s`ı lucente appare;//l’altre e` alzando del cor le luci chiare // al libro de la croce, ov’Egli stesso // si mostra a noi s`ı da presso // che l’almo allor non puo` per l’occhio errare. 129. Carlo Ossola interprets this distinction in terms of debates about authority and argues that Colonna’s reference to the two books is important because she omits the church’s role in guiding Scriptural interpretation (Ossola, Juan de Valdés, 84). However, I think that interpretation reads a later worldview back into the sixteenth century, insofar as it suggests that Colonna was motivated above all by questions about how to accommodate, and bypass, ecclesial authority. 130. On the tradition, see Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart, 108, and Jill Averil Keen, The Charters of Christ and Piers Plowman: Documenting Salvation (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). Keen analyzes how the traditional notion of Christ as a charter was, in some Middle English poems, transformed into the claim that Christ himself is the book that should be read. Keen notes that this imagery may have been a response to Lollard preaching or a manifestation of the late medieval emphasis on visceral images of the Passion (45–9). Benedetto Nicolini suggests that the Capuchin preacher Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), who later repudiated the Catholic Church, inspired Colonna to read the book of the Cross (Nicolini, “Sulla religiosità di Vittoria Colonna,” 25–44, 40). 131. For an extraordinary historical analysis of why Christ’s suffering became so important to Christians in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).



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132. B. Altaner, “Die Briefe Jordans von Sachsen,” Quellen und Forschung zu Geschichte des Dominikanerordens in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1925), xx, Ep. xvi, xv. 18–20 cited in Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 283. 133. “Intentio Regulae” cited in Smalley, Study of the Bible, 285. 134. Smalley, Study of the Bible, 285. 135. A. J. McCarthy, Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 92 (Salzburg, 1981): 32, cf. xxxviii–xliii, cited in Vincent Gillespie, “Lukynge in haly bukes: Lectio in some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies,” in Spätmittelalterliche Geistliche Literature in der nationalsprache, Analecta Cartusiana 106, 2 vols, (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistic, 1984) Vol. 2, 11. 136. Gillespie, “Lukynge in haly bukes.” 137. Beryl Smalley, Study of the Bible, 281 –84; Gillespie, “Lukynge in haly bukes,” Vol. 2, 10. 138. Of course, the conventional answer was that Renaissance thinkers likened Plato to Christian writers because he was unlike Aristotle. Plato thereby became a mascot for Italian humanists as they opposed the “culturally narrow and ‘impious’ Aristotelianism of the Italian universities and conventual schools” (Hankins, Plato in the Renaissance, Vol. 1, 261, citing Bessarion’s In calumnaitorum Platonis). 139. Hankins, Plato in the Renaissance, Vol. 1, 8–17. 140. Erasmus, Paraclesis, LB V, translated in John C. Olin, ed., Christian Humanism, 104, 100. 141. Jerrold Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 98. 142. Erasmus, Enchiridion, CWE 66: 35, 69, 101, 127, LB V. 143. Erasmus, Ratio seu Methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam, LB V; cf. J. B. Payne, “Towards the Hermeneutics of Erasmus,” in Scrinium Erasmianum, ed. J. Coppens (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), Vol. 2, 13–49, 42. 144. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 85–90, 43. 145. Erasmus, Dialogus Ciceronianus, CWE 28:446, ASD 1 –2 708. See John F. D’Amico, Papal Humanism, 138 and n112. 146. CWE 28:393, ASD 1 –2 644. 147. CWE 28:448, ASD 1 –2 709. 148. Cf. Cave, Cornucopian Text, 90. 149. Amtower, Engaging Words, 5. 150. Thus Wolfgang Liebenwein’s classic argument that the Renaissance study emerged as the tradition of the royal treasury converged with the monastic cell. Lo Studiolo: Die Entstehung eines Raumtyps und seine Entwicklung bis um 1600 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1977), 30–128. 151. Steven Shapin traces the Western tradition of valorizing scholarly solitude in “‘The Mind Is Its Own Place’: Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England.” Science in Context 4 (1990): 191 –218. 152. Thornton, Scholar in His Study, 177. 153. Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, 15.3, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 2:256. On the influence of Petrarch’s image see



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Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers, 211 –14; Nancy Struever, Theory as Practice, 32–4; John H. Fisher, “The Myth of Petrarch,” in Jean Misrahi Memorial Volume: Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Hans R. Runte, Henri Niedzielski, and William L. Hendrickson (Columbia, SC: French Literature Publications, 1977), 359–71. Cited in King, Venetian Humanism, 5. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 51 ; Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, 47; Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 183–94; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present, 129 (Nov. 1990): 30–78, 31 ; William Sherman, John Dee, 45–50; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 145–56. On intellectuals’ deep concern with professional status, see Ingrid Rowland The Culture of the High Renaissance, 14, 18, 86–8. Grafton and Jardine, “Women Humanists: Education for What?” in From Humanism to the Humanities, see esp. 47–57.

chapter 4: necessary relationships 1. Thomas More, Englysh Workes, 1455, trans. William Rastell (1557), reprinted in The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Rogers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 559–63. I used Rastell’s translation of More’s Latin letter because its flowery, formal style underscores the distance between Renaissance and modern notions of friendship, but I modernized the spelling for readability. 2. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lorna Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth Century England (London: Routledge, 1994); Peter N. Miller, “Friendship and Conversation in SeventeenthCentury Venice,” The Journal of Modern History 73 (March 2001 ): 1 –31. Like these works, Alan Bray’s recent book The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) emphasizes that people embraced friendship in order to gain protection against the dangers that inhered in public life. Bray’s work is distinctive because he emphasizes that friendship had religious meaning, but as I discussed in the Introduction, this is largely because he thinks religion performs the function of creating solidarity. What his approach elides, however, is that people invest their relationships with religious or spiritual significance in order to satisfy their need for meaning or a sense of transcendence. 3. More, Englysh Workes, 1455. Cf. Elizabeth McCutcheon, “‘The Apple of My Eye’: Thomas More to Antonio Bonvisi: A Reading and a Translation,” Moreana 18 nos. 71 –2 (1981 ): 37–56. 4. “Seen as the conceptualizing of human problems, [theology] is less the definition of what is different from man than the definition of what man is capable of defining, for himself ” (Ullrich Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], 20–1). As Langer notes, this is akin to Kenneth Burke’s argument about how language is shaped by theological principles (Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology [Boston: Beacon Press, 1961 ; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970], 2).



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NOTES TO PAGE 120–121

This description draws on Elizabeth McKutcheon, “Margaret More Roper: The Learned Woman in Tudor England,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 449–80, esp. 449; and Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 92–5. Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, trans. Philip E. Hallett, ed. E. E. Reynolds (New York: Fordham, 1966). In a scathing discussion about feminist scholars who say that Renaissance women translators were imitating works by men rather than creating their own – and that, by the same token, women were allowed to translate more readily than they were permitted to compose their own works – Goldberg invokes Lori Chamberlain’s observation that “translating is like writing” (Goldberg, Desiring Women, 76–83, citing Lori Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” Signs 13 [1988]: 454–72, esp. 466; reprinted in Rethinking Translation, ed. Lawrence Venuti [London: Routledge: 1992]). Goldberg’s critique seems overblown: As he notes, in the age of Luther and humanist recoveries (often through translation) of classical texts, translation was in fact a highly valued, even revolutionary form of writing. Nevertheless, these same movements drew important distinctions between translations and original sources – thus the rallying cry ad fontes! Notably, a source that Goldberg cites to support his claim that humanists valued translation brings up precisely the complexity that Goldberg elides: He quotes Wendy Wall’s observation that “the opposition between original and . . . imitative works is . . . largely absent in the Renaissance; the notion of original writing became valorized only later.” But Wall goes on to note that gender was often used “as a means of denigrating translation’s autonomous status” (Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993], 337 n78). Moreover, the same feminists who have misgivings about the autonomy of translations are responsible for bringing female translators to scholars’ attention – Roper, after all, is included in a volume called Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. Nevertheless, Goldberg’s point is valuable insofar as it encourages scholars to emphasize that translations are creative forms of scholarship, both intellectually and culturally significant. See, for example, Jonathan Sheehan’s work on Enlightenment Bible translations (Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005]). Roper also garnered Erasmus’s approval and, as she herself emphasized, thereby enhanced her reputation among men of letters (Margaret More Roper, “Correspondance entre Erasme et Margaret Roper,” Moreana 12 (1966): 29–46, 121 ; esp. 43). Goldberg notes that Roper “uses the letter from Erasmus as a passport beyond the domestic sphere” (Goldberg, Desiring Women, 97). Margaret More Roper, A deuoute treatise vpon the Pater noster (London, 1526). Early English Books Online [electronic resource]. Available from: , and in Moreana 7 (1965): 9–64, esp. 42; reprinted in Richard DeMolen, ed., Erasmus of Rotterdam: A Quincentennial Symposium (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), 93–124. Erasmus’s Precatio dominica appears in LB V, 1217–1228. My discussion of Roper’s translation follows the readings offered by Goldberg, Desiring Women, 102, and by McCutcheon, “Margaret More Roper,” 462–3, both of whom stress that Roper’s translation places more emphasis on the relationship between child and (heavenly) father.



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10. Goldberg, Desiring Women, 104, cf. Forrest Tyler Stevens, “‘Erasmus’s Tigress’: The Language of Friendship, Pleasure, and the Renaissance Letter,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 124–40. 11. See Chapter 3, n72, 12. Goldberg explains that even as Roper replaces “filius” with the ungendered “child,” she embraces the gendered connotations of “frater,” and she can claim thereby a place for herself, by insisting that this fraternity replaced a kinship relationship of natural brotherhood (Desiring Women, 104). 13. “The ‘gostly lernyng of the gospell’ and Erasmian imitation provide Roper with a writing position in which she can both claim (spiritual) equalization and undermine female subordination” (Goldberg, Desiring Women, 109, citing Roper’s Pater noster, 31). 14. William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 239. 15. More, Correspondence, 510. 16. Goldberg, Desiring Women, 113; cf. Jonathan Crewe, “Remembering Thomas More: The Encomium moriae of William Roper,” in Trials of Authorship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 79–100; Germain Marc’hadour, “Funiculus Triplex: Margaret Roper and Thomas More,” Moreana 78 (1983): 93–7. 17. Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 66. 18. It is interesting to contrast the fact that this sort of reformer characteristically deemphasized ascetic practices, with Cynthia Marshall’s psychoanalytic explanation for the appeal of religious suffering in early modern England. Marshall argues that violence was a necessary response to self-alienation caused by strict moral and social codes. The pious literati I study, however, arguably found more pacific ways to deal with the inevitable misfit between ego and subjective experience by focusing on friendship. This speculative point only scratches the surface of what would be an intriguing comparison. See Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 159–61. 19. See Vittoria Colonna, Rime, ed. Allan Bullock (Bari: Laterza, 1982), S1 :41 : “When our thought returns to itself, and then the mind comes out from under itself [we see Christ on the cross]. . . . These are his graces, not ours, which they have through the gift and guide of the Holy Spirit. . . . If one confines himself to fragile human works then, like the first father [Adam] he is deluded, and in vain breathes out to another a new deception he has received.” 20. Colonna, Rime, S1 :121 : “fermato il desio, fermar le piante / sovra un gran monte; ond’io mi specchio e tergo / nel bello exempio, e l’alma drizzo ed ergo / dietro l’orme beate e l’opre sante.” 21. Colonna, Rime, A1 :11 : “S’io verde prato scorgo trema l’alma / priva di speme, e se fior vaghi miro / si rinverde il desir del mio bel frutto / ch morte svelse, ed a lui grave salma / tolse in un breve e felice sospiro, / coprendo il mondo e me d’eterno lutto.” 22. John Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s Eroici furori (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).



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23. Cf. John 15:15 and 17, cited in John of Damascus, On the Divine Images: Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, trans. David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980). 24. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 401. 25. A. Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarotti, 77, quoted in John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarotti, Vol. 2, 1911 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 118. Condivi’s “Life” is translated in Michelangelo Buonarotti, Life, Letters, and Poetry, trans. G. Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1 –73. 26. Michelangelo, poems 163, 165, in Michelangelo Buonarotti, The Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. James Saslow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 321, 323; Colonna, Carteggio, 268, translated in J. A. Symonds, Life of Michelangelo, 106. 27. Michelangelo, Il carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Giovanni Poggi, Paola Barocchi, and Renzo Ristori (Florence: Sansoni, 1965–79) MCXLVII (translated in The Letters of Michelangelo, trans. and ed. E. H. Ramsden, 2 vols. [London: Owen, 1963], 347): Michelangelo said that she “was devoted to me, and I no less to her. Death has deprived me of a great friend.” (For Colonna on Michelangelo, see MCLXVIII. For Michelangelo’s description of Colonna as a man within a woman see poem 235; cf. his reference to a female addressee as “lord” in poem 160, Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow, 316). 28. Poem 161 in Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow, 317. 29. Klaus Ganzer, Michelangelo und die religiösen Bewegungen seiner Zeit (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1996). 30. Christopher Ryan, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Introduction (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 143. 31. Poem 163, in Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow, 321 ; cf. Poem 254. Ryan cites these poems along with others I quote here, and my entire discussion of what friendship meant for Michelangelo is directly indebted to his subtle discussion (Ryan, Poetry of Michelangelo, esp. Chs. 6 and 7, on Cavalieri and Colonna, respectively). 32. Poem 257 in Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow, 435. 33. Ibid. 34. Cf. Poems 151, 152, 154, 162, 229, 236, 254 in Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow. 35. Poem 151, following the translation in Buonarotti, The Poems, ed. and trans. Christopher Ryan (London: J. M. Dent, 1996), 141. 36. Poem 105 in Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow, 236. 37. The manuscript prepared for Marguerite de Navarre is Ashburnham 1153 in the Bibloteca Medicea Laurenziana and was published in critical editions by Domenico Tordi, Il Codice delle Rime di Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, Appartenuto a Margherita d’Angoulême, Regina di Navarra. Scoperto ed Illustrato (Pistoia, Italy: G. Flori, 1900). The manuscript prepared for Michelangelo is Codice Vaticano Latino 11539. On these collections see Abigail Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” and idem, “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” Modern Language Review, 96 (2001 ): 61 –81. 38. For descriptions and plates of the first, and a copy of a preparatory study of the third, see Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and his Drawings (New Haven: Yale University



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39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

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Press, 1988), 117–18, plates 236 and 97; and for a photo of the Pietà see Alexander Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” Art Bulletin 79.4 (December 1997): 647–69, photo 1. Nagel republished much of the material from this article in his Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Giorgio Vasari, who wrote a biography of Michelangelo in 1568, explained that Michelangelo did not like presents because “it seemed to him, when someone gave him something, that he was put under a permanent obligation” (Giorgio Vasari, Le vita de più eccelente pittore, scultori et architettori . . . [1568] vi, ed. Paola Barocchi and Rosa Bettarini [Florence, 1987] 112, cited in Nagel, “Gifts,” 649 n10. Michelangelo, Lettere, CDLIV; translated J. A. Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo, 100. Nagel discusses the difficulties involved in translating this passage in “Gifts,” 649 n9. Jacques Derrida, Counterfeit Money, Vol. 1 of Given Time, Vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1 –83. Here I follow Nagel’s use of Derrida in “Gifts,” 651. On presentation drawings as a new category see Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings, 105–7; on the way they fetishized secrecy see Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991 ), 82; and for the link to the privatization of art see Nagel, “Gifts,” 665–8. Barkan, Transuming Passion, 81. Colonna to Michelangelo, in Sylvia Ferrino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos (Vienna: Skira, 1997), 399. Ltr. cxxiv in Colonna, Carteggio, 209; translated in J. A. Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo, 104. Nagel, “Gifts,” 649; cf. Brundin, “Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” 73, where she approvingly cites Nagel’s point. When doing final revisions on this book I discovered that Barry Collett articulated a similar critique of Nagel’s emphasis on individualism: “The piety of the spirituali was not so much an individualistic endeavor as it was a piety of a small intimate community made up first of self and Christ, but including friends, intimates, and like-minded persons” (Barry Collett, A Long and Troubled Pilgrimage: The Correspondence of Marguerite d’Angoulême and Vittoria Colonna 1540–1545 [Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000], 88). I differ from this only in thinking that these pious literati did not distinguish clearly – as Collett suggests they did – between a “primary” relationship between self and Christ and a “secondary” relationship with other people. Hirst, Michelangelo and his Drawings. “The construction of collective identities is influenced or shaped by codes through which ontological or cosmological premises and conceptions of social order prevalent in a society influence the specification of the definition of the major arenas. The major codes of the construction of collective identity are primordiality [gender, generation, kinship, territory, language, and race], civility [implicit and explicit rules of conduct, traditions, and social routines], and sacredness [links the boundary between us and them to the relation of the collective subject to the transcendental].” In Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, “Introduction,” in Public Spheres and Collective Identities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Wolfgang Schluchter, and Björn Wittrock (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001 ), 14–15.



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49. Quoted after the translation by Creighton Gilbert in Michelangelo, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo, ed. Robert Linscott, trans. Creighton Gilbert (New York: Random House, 1965), 276. For the Italian see Poggi, Barochi, and Ristori, eds., iv, 299. Nagel notes a similar sentiment in Marcantonio Flaminio who writes in a letter to Contarini about his inability to write on command, though as a humanist serving a patron he was always in a position where this was the expectation (Nagel, “Gifts,” n51, citing Marcantonio Flaminio, Lettere, ed. Alessandro Pastore [Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1978], 98–9). 50. Guillaume Briçonnet, Guillaume Bri¸connet et Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance (1521–1524), 2 vols., ed. Christine Martineau, Michel Vessière, and Henrey Heller (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1975, 1979), 1, nos. 81, 86. For this biblical image see Isaiah 44:3–4; John 4:10, 7:37–39. 51. Ltr. xcii in Colonna, Carteggio, ed. Eramanno Ferrero and Guiseppe Müller (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1892), 185–7: Le alte et religiose parole della humanissima lettera di V. Maestà mi dovriano insegnare quel sacro silentio, che in vece di lode s’offerisce alle cose divine; . . . Et se tanta gratia l’infinita bontà mi concederà, sarà compito un mio intenso desiderio, il qual e` stato gran tempo questo, ch’havendo noi bisogno in questa lunga et difficil via della vita di guida, che ne mostri il camino con la dottrina, et con l’opre insieme ne inviti a superar la fatica; et parendomi che gli essempii del suo proprio sesso a ciascuno sian piu` prportionati, et il seguir l’un l’altro piu` lecito; mi rivoltava alle donne grandi dell’Italia, per imparare da loro et imitarle: et benchè ne vedessi molte vertuose, non pero` giudicava che giustamente l’altre tutte quasi per norma se la proponesseno, in una sola fuor d’Italia s’intendeva esser gongioncte le perfettioni della volontà insieme con quelle d l’intelletto. . . . et certo non mi sarà difficile il viaggio per illuminare l’intelletto mio et pacificar la mia coscienza. 52. Ibid, 186, following Barry Collett, A Long and Troubled Pilgrimage, 111. 53. Ibid. 54. Ltr. ix in Nuovi Documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole, ed. Sergio M. Pagano and Concetta Ranieri (Vatican City: Archivio Vaticano, 1989), 117, following Collett, Long and Troubled Pilgrimage, 117. 55. Collett, Long and Troubled Pilgrimage. 56. Ltr. cxx in Colonna, Carteggio, 203, following Collett, Long and Troubled Pilgrimage, 114. 57. See her praise of Marguerite de Navarre, ltr. xcii in Colonna, Carteggio, 186. 58. Mayer, Reginald Pole, 448, 451. 59. “[Pole] haveva spesso ragionamenti con quella signora et in Roma et in Viterbo, et sempre, credo, delle cose di Dio, perchè l’uno et l’altro se delettava piu` di questo che di niuno altro subietto . . . I particulari di lor ragionamenti non poteva intendere nè io nè altri,” In “Estratto del processo di Mons. Pietro Carnesecchi,” ed. Giacomo Manzoni, in Miscellanea di storia italiana, vol. 10 (1870), 268–269. 60. On Pole and Colonna see Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 71 –3, 96–9; Mayer, Reginald Pole, 70, 135–41, 390–2; and H. Jedin, “Kardinal Pole und Vittoria Colonna,” in Kirche des Glaubens, Kirche der Geschichte, Vol. 1 (Freiburg: Herder 1966), 181 –94 (for the Italian translation see H. Jedin, “Il Cardinal Pole e Vittoria Colonna,” Chiesa della Fede, Chiesa della Storia: Saggi Scelti [Brescia: Morcelliana, 1972]). A poem that Ludovico Domenichi identifies as written by



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61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

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Marguerite de Navarre to Colonna succinctly articulates this notion that Colonna and Pole shared about the duty to help a friend achieve enlightenment: “And since you have seen the true light, /help others know that their hopes are not in vain,/ so that they may feel enlightened and serene (E poichè scorto il vero lume avete, / fate che ancor son sia per gli altri vano; / ma che il provi ciascun chiaro e sereno)” Translated in Irma B. Jaffe, Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 54. Pole, Calendar, Correspondence, nos. 314, 330, 332. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110–69, esp. 121, 168. Pole, Calendar, Correspondence, 215 and 222, following Mayer’s translation and discussion in Reginald Pole, 74–5. Ltr. 3 in Pagano and Ranieri, eds., Nuovi documenti, 98. Ltr. 3 in Pagano and Ranieri, eds., Nuovi documenti, 98–9. Colonna, Rime, S1 :142: “forse da quella ardente voglia spinta / . . . aggradir le potrebbe anco dipinta./ Cio` pensando, signor, la vostra umile / nova madre ed ancella ora v’invia / l’opra ch’in voi miglior mastro scolpio.” Colonna, Rime, S1 :141 Pagano and Ranieri, eds., Nuovi documenti, 42; cf. Il processo inquisitoriale del Cardinal Giovanni Morone, ed. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto (Rome, Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1981 –96) 6 vols., 2:1068–71 ; cf. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 2–7. Mayer notes that Pole repeatedly withdrew from confrontations with other men into a circle that included women, Colonna foremost among them (Mayer, Reginald Pole, 105). Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 2, 9, 12–13. Elizabeth Cropper, “The Place of Beauty in the High Renaissance and its Displacement in the History of Art,” in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, ed. Alvin Vos (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 159–205, 161 –2, 201. Her argument is summarized in Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsy, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 177–82. Nagel also uses Cropper to open up a discussion of religion, but his focus is on the discourse of grace and gifts rather than desire (Nagel, “Gifts,” 31 –3). Elizabeth Clark offers a succinct example of a parallel case in early Christianity. The patristic discussion of how friendships could be disturbed if either friend changes his way of life in order to concentrate more fully on God was borne out in the case of the conflict that emerged between Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzus (Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations [New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1979], 42). As Nancy Struever puts it in her subtle study of the ethics of humanist practices: “Petrarch’s discipline . . . is a discipline of discursive exchange and concession, riposte and agreement. There is a very strictly defined intimacy which insists on sociability; recall Petrarch’s figure of books as an extended acquaintance, creating familiarity” (Theory as Practice, 32–3, citing Rerum novarum III, 18).



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75. Contarini was in a sense trying to double back on the evolution of medieval assumptions about letter writing. On this history see Giles Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen aˆ ge occidental 17 (Turnhout: Ed. Brepols, 1976). Letters, which originated as oral messages, were initially seen as a simple substitute for spoken words; the personal and self-revelatory letters that emerged by the eleventh century were caught up with the developing cult of friendship (14). In the thirteenth century, letter collections declined, in part because of a renewed conviction among monks that letters were dangerous and threatened seclusion (37). In the fourteenth century, Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters coincided with the introduction of a new genre of vernacular letters of spiritual advice – a genre notably practiced not only by men but also by women such as Catherine of Siena. Contarini clearly sought out and prioritized spiritual advice, but because he saw his close circle of friends as the primary source of this kind of nourishment, he was initially frustrated by the idea that this advice was transmitted by letter rather than in person. Moreover, although Contarini could draw on the humanist idea that letters should be written in a style that resembles speech, Contarini differed from the humanists because he is less concerned about the style of the language than about the form – and effect – of the interaction. 76. Ltr. 1, G. Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 12: Me saria etiam gratissimo, quando qualche volta ve avanza tempo, me scrivessati qualche paroleta, azio` potesse almen a questo modo ragionar con vui. 77. Ltr. 10, G. Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 35: Non sero` adonque privo del conversar con vui come io me pensava. 78. Ltr. 10, G. Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 35: Per tanto, Messer Vincentio mio, me rendo certissimo che non vi serà noia un poccho de ora del giorno spender in scriverne, azio` poi, in capo de alquanti giorni, possiamo longamente ragionar con vui, il che suplirà a tuti li ragionamenti che in molti giorni qui in Venetia solevamo far insieme 79. Ltr. 13, G. Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 41 : deliberai di scriverve, azio` con questo mezzo potesse nutrir quel desiderio de la iucundissima conversation vostra. 80. Ltr. 1, G. Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 11 : Fo leto una vostra lettera piena de tanto affecto, di tanta chiareza che cus`ı manifestamentre dimonstrava el vero et confutava quelle frivole rason, le qual ne retiene (et mi piu` de tuti li altri) che, benchè sempre habbi cognosciuto l’animo vostro affectuosissimo et la dextreza vostra nel scriver vostri concepti, non di meno non posso far altro iudicio che non vui ma el spirito che in vui era per vostra man havesse cus`ı ditato 81. Ltr. 8, G. Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 27: Et quel tuto che altre volte, mi ricordo, di questa cosa havete lecto in molti auctori phylosophi et christiani, vedo da vui con tanta elevazione de intellecto esser gustata, che anchora in me, leggendo quella parte, ne risultva uno poccho di gusto. 82. Ltr. 3, Contarini und Camaldoli, 15: Ià alquanti giorni me fu ressa una vostra lettera piena di quella charità che in voi redundando empie etiam ogni vostra opera, ogni vostra parola. 83. Ltr. 4, Contarini und Camaldoli, 18: Le cose vostre che mandasti a Messer Vincentio me son state di tanta satisfaction et consolation quanto cose altre che mai habbia letto. Et voria volentiera haverle habute apreso de mi over che almen le fosse ristate



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84.

85.

86. 87.

88.

89.

90.

91.

92.

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in questa terra, azio` qualche volta havesse potuto ragionar con vui in quelle scriture et excitar questo mio adormentato animo. This is Jedin’s spelling of the last name although Contarini uses “Galiano” and “Galgiano.” In a treatise he wrote about Savonarola, Contarini invoked the same terms he used for Galliano when he said that Savonarola should be found innocent of charges of heresy “in view of his vast learning and saintly life.” For the treatise see Felix Gilbert, “Contarini on Savonarola: An Unknown Document of 1516,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 59 (1968): 145–50. Ltr. 19, Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 50: Sempre me si rapresenta a la mente . . . sopra tuti il gentilissimo Galiano, el quale fin che vivo amero` forse quanto me medesimo. Al quale ho scrito piu` fiate, et hora scrivo, perchè, dapoichè altrimente per hora non posso conversar con lui, ogni sabato son per scriverli et consumare un’hora ragionando con lui a quel modo che mi e` concesso. In tuta la septimana non credo sia per spendere una hora con tanto mio piacere quanto quella. Bowd, Reform before the Reformation, 100, 12. Ltr. 10, Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 35: Se Aristotle, privo del lume vero e di quella charitate, la qual sola Iesu Christo ha lassato per precepto a tuti nui, dice nel nono Libro de la Hetica sua che, essendo officio de ogni amico subvegnir a l’amico suo ne li besogni sui circa le cose pertinente al corpo et a la fortuna, molto piu` debbe esser officio de l’amico subvegnire l’altro amico ne li deffecti sui circa li beni de l’animo, li quali veramente son beni et veramente sonno nostri. Ltr. 5, Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 20: Questi erano certi inditii che non era voluntà de la sua Maiestà nè el ben vostro restar in quelle parte et viver in solitudine, lassando privi molti amici vostri et innumere altre persone di grande utilità, la qual prendevano per la conversation vostra. Cf. McClure’s treatment of Coluccio Salutati’s discussion of caritas as friendship with God and a bond that ties society together. Like Contarini, Salutati drew on Aristotle but also, explicitly, Cicero’s de amicitia and de officiis for his arguments that friendship was defined by virtue, reciprocity, and mutual identification (George McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 ], 76 and 227 n84). Ltr. 5, Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 20: Quante volte credete vui, Messer Vincentio mio, che, retrovandome in grandissima perturbation di mente, il vegnir a star con vui et ragionar con vui me rendesse un animo quietissimo, de perturbatissimo? Et quante volte, dapoi che seti partito, credete vui che io in simel occorentie ve habbi desiderato et hora vi desideri? Ltr. 7, Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, 25: Non potresti creder quanta fidanza sia nel cor mio di non perderve, et che la voluntà de Christo non sia che li serviate separato dal consortio nostro, ma che el volgi che noi laudiamo la Maiestà sua ne la conversation vostra. Elizabeth Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in SeventeenthCentury France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 35–7 (quote on 35). Citing Elias, Goldsmith points out that sincerity is the ideology of outsiders because it was “thought to disrupt the perfect equanimity of a social encounter” (36). George McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, 18–72 in general. Cf. Biow, Doctors, 39–40. On Ficino see James Hankins, Plato in the Renaissanace (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 267.



216 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106.

107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112.

113.

114. 115.

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Thomas More, The Last Things, in CWTM 1 :146–7. Pole’s letter in Colonna, Carteggio ltr. cxxxix, 231. Pole, Defense, 6–7; De unitate, 3r. Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981 ) Ch. 6. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 21 –24. Richard Marius, Thomas More, 446–52. More, Correspondence, ltr. 197, 484. CWTM 15:116. This point is underscored by the fact that More here quotes from a verse Dorp wrote: Nec sunt artis illa uocabula, ut sint eis quasi in peculio, et ab eis, si quis uolet uti, sumenda mutuo, communis nimirum sermo est, nisi quod quaedam deterius reddunt, quam a cerdonibus eadem acceperunt. CWTM 15:289. William Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More, 202. CWTM 12:6. On Antony’s foolishness, see the opening speeches in Book II of A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (CWTM 12); and Nancy Yee, “Thomas More’s Moriae Encomium: The Perfect Fool in A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, Moreana no. 101 –2 (May 1990): 65–74. CWTM 12:83–85. Cf Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 168, a.2. “If anything I have said seems rather impudent or garrulous, you must remember it’s Folly and a woman who’s been speaking . . . it’s silly of you to suppose I can remember what I’ve said when I’ve been spouting such a hotchpotch of words. . . . Here is a new [saying] . . . : ‘I hate an audience which won’t forget’” (CWE 27:153, ASD IV-3 194). CWTM 27:152, ASD IV-3 192. Erasmus, De amabili ecclesiae concordia (On the Amiable Concord of the Church) translated in Michael Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London: Duckworth, 1980), 240. Screech, Ecstasy, 202–18. The biblical references are 2 Cor 12:2 and Luke 9:33. Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 36–7; CWE 3:276; Allen, 2:228. Erasmus, Parabolae sive Similia, in CWE 23:131 ; ASD V: 1 –332. This letter is analyzed in terms of debt and credit by Natalie Zemon Davis, “Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 69–88; Lorna Hutson uses it to introduce her argument about the instrumental value of persuasive communication among friends in Usurer’s Daughter, 4. Ep. 684, CWE 5:150: “Yet letters (making naught of envious space)/ bring near the loved one’s mind, and I his face” (Allen 3:105–7). Here I followed Jardine’s translation (Erasmus, Man of Letters, 31). For other examples of the popular trope of letters’ ability to make absent friends present, see Man of Letters, Ch. 6. Ep. 403, CWE, 3:276, 278; Allen 2:228, 229. As Eden describes the Pythagorean ideal of commonality that influenced Augustine, she writes that “discourse is one of those activities – perhaps even the central



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116.

117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128.

129.

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activity – that binds friends together. For it is in conversation, joke telling, and reading and even disputing together . . . that individuals express their friendship and forge the bonds that unify a multiplicity. For Augustine moreover, as for Plato and Pythagoras, the best social praxis corresponds to the best rhetorical praxis. Like community, discourse depends on the proper relation of the parts to a whole” (“Koinonia and the Friendship between Rhetoric and Religion,” in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry, ed. W. Jost and W. Olmsted [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997] 316). In a letter he wrote as part of a campaign to gain release from his religious vows, Erasmus narrates his experiences as a story about two fictional characters who stand in for Erasmus and his brother: Ep. 447, CWE, 4:16. The stripped-down account appears in his Compendium vitae, which he wrote when he was about 57 years old: CWE 4:399–410. Ep. 447, CWE 4:17; 4:407. Ep. 20, CWE 1 :29. For a psychoanalytic reading of Erasmus’s passionate attachment to his friends, see N. H. Minnich and W. W. Meissner, “The Character of Erasmus,” 598–624. Ep. 108, CWE 1 :205. Ep. 181, CWE 2:86; cf. John Gleason, John Colet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 111 –13. Ep. 106, CWE 2:198–200. Ep. 107, CWE 2:201. Ep. 109, CWE 2:206. See John O’Malley’s general introduction to Erasmus’s spiritual and pastoral works, in CWE 66:ix-xii and James D. Tracy, “Humanists among the Scholastics,” 30–51. J. Gleason, John Colet, 95, although the standard title, used in Michael J. Heath’s translation in CWE 70:1 –67, opts for the more literal title, “A Short Debate.” Ep. 30 CWE 1 :55. “Chè quanto a la satisfaction di i peccati fati et in i quali la fragilità humana casca, la passion sua e` stà sufficiente et piu` che bastante” (G. Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, ltr. 2, 14). “Poi el Sabato Sancto andato a riconciliarme a San Sebastiano, parlai un bon pezo con un Padre religioso pieno di sanctità, el qual infra vari ragionamenti, quasi se havesse saputo la mia molestia, me comincio` a ragionar che la via de la salute era piu` ampia di quel che molti se persuadeno. Et qui, non me cognoscendo altrimente, me disse molte parole” (G. Contarini, Contarini und Camaldoli, ltr. 2, 14). On the practice of confession in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries see Roberto Rusconi, “Dal pulpito all confessione: Modelli di comportamento religioso in Italia tra 1470 circa e 1520 circa,” in Strutture ecclesiastiche in Italia e in Germania prima della Riforma, ed. Paolo Prodi and Peter Johanke (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1984), 259–315. Ignatius Loyola’s Autobiography begins with a similar account of a conversation in a garden where, like Contarini’s description of his conversion, it seems to foreshadow a confessional model that, as John W. O’Malley has shown, the Jesuits popularized: the confession as general review and an aid to spiritual growth rather than a specific means of absolution (O’Malley, The First Jesuits [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 137–39).



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130. For a discussion of this tradition of conversion see Constance Furey, “Communication of Friendship: Gasparo Contarini’s Letters to Hermits at Camaldoli,” Church History 72:1 (March 2003): 71 –101. See also Heiko Oberman, “Wir sein pettler. Hoc est verum. Covenant and Grace in the Theology of the Middle Ages,” in The Reformation, trans. Andrew Gow (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 94; and Carol Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 46.

chapter 5: defining the ideal 1. Fortunato Martinengo to Pier Paolo Vergerio, Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini et eccellentissimi ingegni (Venice: Aldo, 1544), 99–102, cited in Concetta Ranieri, “Premesse umanistiche,” 546. 2. Bernard Tasso, Rime (Venice, 1560), critical edition, ed. Domenico Chiodo, 2 vols. (Turin, 1995). 3. Pole’s admiring response (huic miraculi vice fuerunt) was reported by More in a letter to Margaret: ltr. 128 in More, Correspondence, 301. Erasmus’s praise is in Ep. 1404, CWE 10:135. This letter is the preface to Erasmus’s commentary on Prudentius’s hymns for Christmas and Epiphany, printed with Ovid’s Nux. 4. On the logic of gift exchange see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls, foreword by Mary Douglas (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990); and Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift. Davis provides a wonderfully succinct summary of Mauss’s argument and the many subsequent theories that have critiqued or amended his work (3–9). 5. Good studies on praise as a branch of rhetorical theory in the Renaissance include O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument; Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), esp. 89–97, 166–71 ; and John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), 76–94. See also 43–50 and 70–6 for the “epideictic purpose” of sermons. O’Malley underscores the diversity among humanists by noting that the assumptions behind this persuasive style were not shared by two influential Christian rhetoricians, Erasmus and Nicholas of Cusa (72–3, 100–1). For praise in epistles see Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections, and the introduction of Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus, eds., Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 6. On the goal of engendering prudence see Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism; on the popularity of the Stoic ideal of external self-control see John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity,” and Eugene Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 163–70, 191 –7. 7. O’Malley, Praise and Blame, 74–5; Hardison, Enduring Monument, 96–7. 8. Kenneth Burke makes an analogous point about how the epideictic genre escapes categorization (even though it is a clearly defined branch of rhetoric) when he argues that it blurs the distinction between rhetoric and poetics (Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966]), 295.



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9. Eleanor Kaufman, The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 16. Kaufman explains that she sees the masculine laudatory dynamic she studies in twentieth-century French philosophers as emerging out of a lineage of Catholic mystical writings (143 n11). 10. Habermas, Structural Transformation, Goodman, Republic of Letters, Goldgar, Impolite Learning, Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters; Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 11. Pole, De unitatis, 133r; Defense, 329. 12. Pole, De unitatis, 95v; Defense, 235. 13. Pole, De unitatis, 96r; Defense, 235. 14. Pole, De unitatis, 96r; Defense, 235. 15. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. 134 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 267. 16. Pole, Defense, 68, 163. 17. Pole, De unitatis, 77r; Defense, 187. 18. Pole, De unitatis, 66v; Defense, 163. 19. Pole, De unitatis, 60v; Defense, 157. 20. Pole, De unitatis, 100r; Defense, 244. 21. “Cardinal Pole’s speech to the citizens of London, in behalf of religious houses,” in John Strype, ed. Ecclesiastical Memorials, Vol. 3, Pt. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), 490–7. 22. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 268. 23. For literary treatments of fools see Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). The Christian tradition, East and West, is covered in John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), and in Derek Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 24. Ltr. 206, More, Correspondence, 529. There is debate about whether this letter was written by More or by Margaret. In his edition of More’s works, William Rastell wrote that the authorship was uncertain, and modern scholars have not reached consensus. For the debate see The Last Letters of Thomas More, ed. Alvaro De Silva, 166, and Goldberg, Desiring Women, 106–7. 25. Ltr. 206, More, Correspondence, 519 (I modernized some of the spelling in this passage, following De Silva, ed., The Last Letters, 77). 26. Erasmus, Moriae encomium (ASD IV, 2). Cf. Germain Marc’hadour, “A Name for All Seasons,” 539–62. 27. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, trans. and ed. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 193. 28. Erasmus, “Sileni Alcibiades,” in The Adages of Erasmus, selected by William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 251. 29. See Pole, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli . . . [Libri], ed. Angelo Maria Querini (1744–57; facsimile reprint, Farnborough: Gregg Press, 1967), hereafter referred to as Epistolae,



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31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

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2:58 for the reference to things hidden and 1 :479 for the reference to Paradise. See also Pole, Epistolae 2:59 and 1 :35, 41, 475 for other descriptions of Marco; and Pole’s letter to Bembo, 22 January 1537, summarized in The Correspondence of Reginald Pole: Volume 1: A Calendar, 1518–1546: Beginnings to Legate of Viterbo, ed. Thomas F. Mayer (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2002), no. 148. Cf. Mayer, Reginald Pole, 43, 52, 68–9, 78, and Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, 30. Contarini, De officio viri boni ac probi episcopi, in The Office of a Bishop, trans. and ed. John Patrick Donnelly, S. J. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2002), 36, 38. Hereafter page numbers refer to the Latin passages in Donnelly’s edition; translations are my own. Contarini, The Office of a Bishop, 84, 96–7. Contarini, The Office of a Bishop, 82 (Opera, 417). For an overview of the view that knowledge is dangerous, see G. R. Evans, “What We Are Not Supposed to Know,” in The Joy of Learning and the Love of God, ed. E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995). Contarini, The Office of a Bishop, 88. Contarini, The Office of a Bishop, 110. Contarini, Office of a Bishop, 108, 110. Cf. Fragnito, “Cultura umanistica,” 190. Contarini, Office of a Bishop, 90 (Opera, 420). Contarini, Office of a Bishop, 90 (Opera, 420). See Giustiniani’s use of this image in the Regula vitae eremitica (1520; Camaldoli, 1952), f.II-V, quoted in Jean LeClercq, Alone with God (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 25. Compendium primae philosophiae in Contarini, Opera, 93. Compendium primae philosophiae in Contarini, Opera, 93. See Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.242–97 and 13.750–897 for Galatea as a statue sculpted by Pygmalion and brought to life by Aphrodite, and as a sea nymph – depicted by Raphael in the Farnesina palace in Rome (Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett [Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1986], 63). Della Casa, Opera (Venice: Casinelli, 1752) III, 43, quoted in Eisenbichler and Bartlett, Galateo, 65–6. Harry Berger, Jr. The Absence of Grace, 26–7. The historical context for sixteenth-century attitudes is concisely surveyed in the editors’ introduction to the “Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series from the University of Chicago Press. See, for example, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. and ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Barbara Correll, “Malleable Material,” 241 –62, 242–4; Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter. Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 24. Cf. Berger’s discussion (Absence of Grace, 98) of how “symbolic androgony” (as Constance Jordan describes it in Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990], 135) can also be a figure of gynephobic anxiety.



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48. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 26. 49. See Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser’s argument about the Christianization of civic masculinity in the fifth-century West where the emphasis was placed on relationships – on a man’s ability to act with the right degrees of deference and self-assertion in his relationships with other men – instead of on sexual self-control (Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser, “The Gender of Grace: Impotence and Manliness in the Fifth Century,” Gender and History 12:3 [2000]: 536–51). Caroline Walker Bynum’s argument that women were more interested in humanity than gender appears in “‘And Woman His Humanity’ . . . Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages,” Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 150–80, 156, 167–9. 50. A stark contrast to this is provided by Daniel Boyarin’s explanation of how scholarship defined masculine identity in rabbinical Judaism: Because rabbinic Jews valued the flesh and sexuality, and so could not decouple virtue from vice by valorizing celibate asceticism, learning was a crucial source of masculinity. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 217. 51. Angelo Poliziano to Cassandra Fedele in Cassandrae Fidelis Venetae: epistolae et orationes, ed. J. F. Tomasini (Padua, 1536), 155–8, in Cassandra Fedele, Letters and Orations, trans. Diana Robin, in “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series, ed. Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 90–1 : “Earlier times no longer have the right to boast about their Muses, Sibyls, Pythian priestesses, Pythagorean women philosophers, Socrates’s Diotima, or Aspasia. Nor should Greek monuments show off the names of their women poets: Telesilla, Corinna, Sappho.” 52. Ltr. cxvi in Colonna, Carteggio, 196–7: se la bontà di Dio ci anderà suscitando di questi spiriti ferventi in un sesso et l’altro, in questa et in quella città et provincia . . . ci possono svegliar et scaldare nella cognitione delle vere vie et nel servigio di Dio, piu` che tutti gli inchiostri del mondo, che ci scrivessero ogni giorno molte reformationi, et piu` che quante diete si potessero mai fare. 53. Ltr. cxvi in Colonna, Carteggio, 194–96: Io per me son securo che questa habbia ad esser la via, con quale si venirà tosto a purgare et illustrare la santa vigna et Chiesa del Signore, che era piena di spine et di oscurità. 54. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. 160 (Geneva: Droz, 1977). 55. Luca Contile to Conte Ettore di Carpegna, August 9, 1541, in Luca Contile, Lettere 23v–24v: m’incomincio` ad interrogare s’havevo compiti i conviti spirituali, io risposi che non potevo far quei conviti, de quali io non ho meritato di gustar i cibi. tuttavià, per non stare su le chiacchiare, dissi che presto mi havrebbe aiutato Iddio a` fornirli. Volle che io ragionassi seco del primo dove si tratta se D`ıo e` , come e` trino, e uno. Io in dir cio` che sapevo, impero` se ben toccava a` me di rispondere, imparavo da lei quel che mi bisognava. Tengo in somma per cosa certissima, che lo spirito vivifica, e la lettera ammazza, veggo quanto una christiana mente che habbia per istrumento un buon giuditio, sappia far caminar altrui per la strada de la salute . . . questa dico Regina Sabba, piena di riverenza e di dottrina piu tosto infusa, mi credero` io, che



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60. 61.

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63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

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con arte acquisitata. On Contile see A. Salza, Luca Contile, uomo di lettere e di negozii del secolo xvi (Florence, 1903). Poem 325 in Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow, 398: Un uomo in una donna, anzi uno dio / per la sua bocca parla, / ond’io per ascoltarla / son fatto tal, che ma’ piu` saro` mio. Poem 162 in Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow, 319: Porgo la carta bianca / a’vostri sacri inchiostri, / c’amor mi sganni e pietà ‘l ver ne scriva: / . . . Chieggio a voi, alta e diva / donna, saper se ‘n ciel men grado tiene / l’umil peccato che ‘l superchio bene.” Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 38, 49. Poem 111 in Buonarotti, Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. Saslow, 245: Disegna in me di fuora, / com’io fo in pietra od in candido foglio, / che nulla ha dentro, e e` vvi cio` ch’io voglio. Pietro Bembo, Opere volgari (Florence: Sansoni, 1961 ), 683. Ltr. xl in Colonna, Carteggio, 61 : il qual secolo s`ı come tra gli huomini ha lui havuto nelle arme eguale alla virtu` de gli antichi piu` lodati et piu` chiari, cos`ı ha voi, che tra le donne in quest’arte sete assai piu` eccellente che non pare possibile, che al vostro sesso si conceda dalla natura. See for example Heloise’s use of religio rather than vita monastica in a letter to Abelard about the rule he should establish at Paraclete: discussed by Constant Mews in The Lost Love Letters between Abelard and Heloise: Perceptions of Dialogue in TwelfthCentury France (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 158. On Heloise’s claims to authority see also Linda Georgianna, “ ‘In Any Corner of Heaven’: Heloise’s Critique of Monastic Life,” in Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 187–216, 193; and Ann Astell, ed. Lay Sanctity, Medieval and Modern: A Search for Models (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2000), 3. Ep. 1233, CWE 8:298, Allen 4:578. Richard Keickhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13–15. Although Goldberg quotes this to demonstrate how the “imitation of Christ falls under the sway of humanist imitatio” (103), it seems to represent a shift away from a concept of imitation that presumes similitude or literal mimesis to a more pedagogic form of imitation that we might call emulation. Introduction to Rinaldo Corso’s collection, the Trionfo di Cristo [1543], translated in Jerrold, Colonna, 285. Ltr. cxxvi in Colonna, Carteggio, 212: non e` mai sazia [satiate] di favellar di lei e di pensare all’alta virtu` dell’animo suo. This writer goes on to say that Colonna has achieved a perfection of style and thought: “Ella fusse arrivata a quella finezza e perfezione di stile e di concetti che si puo` immaginar piu` vera.” Kaufman, Delirium of Praise. Ep. 1211, CWE 8:235, 237, Allen 4:517, 520. Ep. 1211, CWE 8:237, Allen 4:520: “With the help of philosophy and sacred study and watching, fasting, and prayer . . . he passed his whole life unspotted by the defilements of this world.” Ep. 1211, CWE 8:227–229, Allen 4:509–511.



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72. Ep. 1211, CWE 8:235, Allen, 4:517. 73. Ep. 1211, CWE 8:237, Allen, 4:520; cf. J. Gleason, John Colet, 265–6. Erasmus develops his explicit critique of monasticism in De Contemptu Mundi, but there he emphasizes how current practices betray the original monastic ideals – and deemphasizes his contemporary concern with the relationship between monk and philosopher. On De Contemptu see Eden, Friends, 139. 74. For the thesis that imitatio was religiously significant in the Middle Ages and in the twelfth century in particular, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 82–109, esp. 108. In a recent work about medieval devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, Rachel Fulton (From Judgment to Passion) has shown that the logic of devotional mimesis varied significantly in relation to these two central figures. Medieval hagiographers often cautioned their readers that saints (and their extraordinary feats) were to be admired rather than imitated (on this see Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 13–14). This variety notwithstanding, the logic of mimesis was nevertheless central as it was not for those – such as Renaissance intellectuals – who emphasized the pedagogic rather than the mimetic force of exemplarity: See François Rigolet, “The Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59:4 (1998): 557–63. On exemplum specifically see John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

epilogue 1. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989). 2. Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 36–7. 3. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 11. 4. Miller, ibid, 50; cf. “The ‘Man of Learning’ Defended: Seventeenth-Century Biographies of Scholars and an Early Modern Ideal of Excellence,” in Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 39–62. 5. Ann Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 11, 153, 217, 228. 6. Goldgar, Impolite Learning, 19, 59, 87, 212. 7. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), introduction. 8. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 101 –9. 9. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 21 –36.



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Index

Act of Supremacy, 56 affect. See emotion Alington, Alice, 82 Ambrose, 114 Amtower, Laurel, 94 Anabaptists, 149 Anselm, 93–94 Aquinas, 139 aristocracy and humanism, 117 status of, 60–61 , 72–73, 98–99, 116–117 (see also status) and university education, 64–65 Aristotle Contarini and, 95, 134, 155–156 Erasmus on, 113 Leonicus as student of, 68 Pole as student of, 71 unlike Plato, 206 Augustine, 22, 95, 114, 135, 217 on classical and Christian studies, 49 Confessions, 136, 145 conversion account, 145 Soliloquies, 93 On the Trinity, 94 Avalos Piccolomini, Costanza d’, 110 Barbaro, Ermolao, 115 Barkan, Leonard, 126 Barozzi, Pietro, 154–155 Barton, Elizabeth, 137–138 Batt, Jacob, 144 Bembo, Pietro, 69–72, 99 De imitatione, 101 promoter of Colonna, 100, 101 , 162 Prose della volgar lingua, 69 Benedict, Saint, 22

Berger, Harry, 61 , 157–158 Bible. See Scripture Biow, Douglas, 67 bishops, 73, 147–148, 154–158 Contarini on the ideal bishop, 154–157, 199 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 101 , 102, 104 Bonamico, Lazarus, 75–76 Bonvisi, Antonio, 118 Book of the Cross, 105, 205 Book to a Mother, 112 Bossy, John, 5 Bouwsma, William, 16–17 Bowd, Stephen, 135 Boyarin, Daniel, 221 Boyle, Robert, 91 , 116 Bray, Alan, 5, 207 Brethren of the Common Life, 22, 177 Briçonnet, Guillaume, 128 Brocchieri, Mariateresa, 171 Brown, Peter, 123, 137 Brundin, Abigail, 110, 211 Budaeus, William, 51 Budé, Guillaume, 141 –142 Busleyden, Jérôme de, 37, 38 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 130 Calvin, John, 78–79 Campi, Emidio, 106 Cantimori, Delio, 84 Capuchins, 99 Carmeliano, Pietro, 39–40 Carnesecchi, Pietro, 130 Carpentras, 73 Castiglione, Baldassare: The Courtier, 100–101 Catherine of Siena, 106, 108, 142, 162, 214 Cavalieri, Tommaso, 124–125 Cave, Terence, 52, 114–115

247

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Certeau, Michel de, 137 Chamberlain, Lori, 208 Charles V, 28–29, 94 Christ, body of, parallel to More’s letters, 122. See also Crucifixion Cicero, 24, 114, 214 Clement VII, 72–74 Colet, John, 49, 50–51 , 65, 143–144, 158–159 Collett, Barry, 211 Colocci, Angelo, 188 Colonna, Vittoria, 6–7, 10, 83–84, 98–111 , 122–125 and the Book of the Cross, 105, 205 classical training and spirituality, 163 consolation to Vergerio, 160 and Contarini, 98–99 on humanity and divinity, 202 illumination and the written word, 11 and Marguerite de Navarre, 125, 127–129 and Michelangelo, 109–110, 123–125, 127, 161 –162 and new forms of religious life, 7 poetic forms and influences, 100–102, 201 and Pole, 83–84, 107, 129–131 , 132, 136, 154, 163 possible heresies, 107, 204 praised, 146, 160–161 , 162, 163, 164 scriptural studies, 200–201 writing as spiritual practice, 86–88, 99–111 , 116–117, 194 commentary, 48, 50 community communal ideals and praise, 11 communal self-preservation in the Republic of Letters, 167–168 communal standards in the context of schism, 78–85 community identity, 65–68, 211 constituted by non-gender-specific desire, 131 –132 and conversation, 216–217 created through gift exchanges, 126–127 as destabilizing, 20 for Erasmus,8–9, 16–19, 30–32, 33, 53–54, 55, 165 exegetical methods created by communities, 87 and friendship, 21 –24 versus individualism, in Barry Collett, 211 outside institutions, 65, 89–90, 159, 169 located in interactions, 165 for More, 8–9, 16–19, 21 , 53–54, 82–83 multiple enmeshed communities, 70–71

for Pole, 68–72, 77–78, 80–81 , 149–150 Republic of Letters, 12–13, 166–170 for Roper, 121 scholarly community and peace, 30–32 as third way beyond private and public, 117 women and, 158–162, 163 See also friendship consolation, 136–137 Constable, Giles, 214 Contarini, Gasparo, 6–7, 94–98, 195–196 Camaldoli letters 89 and Colonna, 98–99 and the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia, 99 on conversation, 11 , 132–136, 144–145, 214 and Giustiniani, 89–90, 144, 154 on the ideal bishop, 154–157 on intellect and life of the spirit, 95–98, 199 letters on affect and will, 95–98 new forms of religious life, 7 on reading, 10, 86–94, 112–113, 199 between the sacred and the profane, 158 scholarly retreat as religious quest, 116–117 Contile, Luca, 160–161 conversation and community, 216–217 inferior to writing, 46, 47 and More’s martyrdom, 150–151 physical presence versus letters, 132–136, 214 and scholarship, 11 , 142–144 and spirituality, 46–53, 142, 144–145, 156 conversion, narratives of, 84 Cooper, Kate, 221 Correll, Barbara, 36, 158, 173 Correr, Gregorio, 90 counsel and counselors, 18, 28–29, 73. See also patronage courtiers, 27–28, 32–33, 37, 139, 157–158. See also counsel and counselors; flattery; patronage Crewe, Jonathan, 122 Cromwell, Thomas, 58, 59 Cropper, Elizabeth, 132 cross. See Crucifixion; martyrs Crucifixion “Book of the Cross”, 105, 205 Catherine of Siena’s vision, 108 as devotional focus, 105–107 in Ochino and Valdés, 106 as superior source of knowledge, 148–149 in Viterbo’s preaching, 203 Cummings, Brian, 46, 48, 50 Cyprian, 121

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Dante, 102 Divine Comedy, 100 della Casa, Giovanni: Galateo, 157–158 Derrida, Jacques, 126 desire as marker of distance and absence, 122 non-gender-specific, 131 –132 in Roper’s work, 121 –122 Dionisotti, C. Dionysius the Areopagite, 96, 108, 123 discourse. See conversation Dorp, Martin, 41 ecstasy, 140–141 , 142 Eden, Kathy, 23, 24, 29, 142, 143, 216–217 education classical scholarship as prelude to Scriptures, 90 rhetoric as building block to moral philosophy, 196 of women, 21 , 35–36, 43 Eisenstadt, Schmuel N., 9–10, 59, 211 Elias, Norbert, 60–61 Elton, G.R., 57 emotion as authority for poetry, 103–104, 108 at center of reading rubric, 114–115 emotion in reading, 91 –93, 94, 113 emotional transformation through relationships, 141 –145 friendship and affective knowledge, 133–136 intellect and affect, 94, 95–98, 199 See also love emotional bonds. See community Erasmus, Desiderius, 5–6 “Abbot and the Learned Lady”, 14–15, 17–19 Adages, 30 Antibarbari, 44–45, 144, 182 Ciceronianus, 71 , 114 on Colet and Vitrier, 164–165 Complaint of Peace, 30 De Contemptu Mundi, 223 Disputatiuncula de taedio, pavor, tristicia Iesu, 143–144 on distinctions between estates, 20 Education of a Christian Prince, 28–30 Enchiridion, 1 –2, 30, 48, 49–50, 114 “Examination Concerning the Faith”, 106 on foolishness, 141 , 153 (see also Erasmus, Desiderius: Praise of Folly) friendship, 25, 37, 52, 143–144, 183 and Gilles, Peter, 21

18:21

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on Henry VIII’s scholarship, 186 influence on Valdés, 106–107 letter-writing, 46 Life of Jerome, 44, 52 as model for contemporaries, 12–13, 23–24, 38–39, 150, 167 monastic experience of, 22, 142 on More, 141, 27, 32–37 and new forms of religious life, 7, 8–9, 16–19, 22–24, 53–54, 55 New Testament, critical edition of, 31 Paraclesis, 48, 113 Pater Noster, 17 poetic writings, 67–68 and Pole, 71 –72 on political power, 28–32 Praise of Folly, 17, 23, 28, 31 , 32–33, 36–37, 140–141 , 152 praise of Roper, 146, 164 Precatio Dominica, 121 on purity in texts, 48 Ratio, 114 relationships as locus of salvation, 141 –145 response to Luther, 47 scholarship as religious praxis, 44–45 on scholarship and spirituality, 1 –2, 8–9 on truth as presence in texts, 52 on women and spirituality, 163 eroticized relationships, 121 –122, 130–132 Eucharist, 5 evangelism, 1 –4 exemplarity Christ as rhetorician, 48 Colet and Vitrier, for Erasmus, 164–165 Colonna, for Marguerite de Navarre, 129 emulation versus imitation, 114 in fools, bishops, martyrs, and women, 147–148 Giustiniani and Querini, 133–134 Jerome as model for Erasmus, 44–45 learning and martyrdom, 81 Marguerite de Navarre, 128 Mary, for Colonna, 110–111 mimetic identification with Christ, 112 and moderation, for Contarini, 158 More and Fisher as learned martyrs, 62, 79, 151 Pico della Mirandola, 19 Pole in the image of Christ, 77 See also praise faith, 8, 16–19, 32, 121 and works, 104–105, 202, 204

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Fedele, Cassandra, 159 Ficino, Marsilio, 102, 136 Fisher, John, 62, 79–81 , 148, 149–150 Flaminio, Marcantonio, 130, 212 flattery, 28–29, 118 Florimonte, Galeazzo, 157–158 fools More as fool, 82, 138–139 Patenson, Henry, 151 –152 praised, 11 , 147–148, 151 –154 and spiritualized scholarship, 151 –154 valorized in the fifteenth century, 152–153 See also Erasmus, Desiderius: Praise of Folly forgery, 52 Foucault, Michel, 115–116, 194 Fragnito, Gigliola, 94 Francis of Assisi, 22, 112 Franciscans, 39, 99 friendship Bray on, 5, 207 central to idealistic vision, 40–42 conflated with Christianity, 25 differentiated from patronage, 57 in early modern Europe, 5, 118–119, 207 equality as basis for, 35 Erasmus’s model of, 24, 32 friends as connection to God, 90, 123–125, 128–129 friends as “living books”, 156 and gender, 18, 35–36, 131 –132 and letters,46–50, 69–70, 74–78, 89, 127–129 and martyrdom, 150–151 as model for “platonic love”, 123 in monasticism, 21 –24, 142 and physical presence, 50–53, 126, 132–136, 183 and politics, 25–26 as proof against forgery, 52 as religious community, 4–5 as religious consolation, 136–137 as replacement for religious suffering, 209 in the Republic of Letters, 167 and scholarship, 68–72 as sharing of knowledge, 143–144 and social and professional status, 76–78 spiritual value of,9–11 , 19, 125–127, 131 –132, 207 and transfiguration, 140–141 as uncalculating, 33–34, 37 See also community Froben, 27, 37 Fulton, Rachel, 223

Gabriele, Trifone, 90 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 50 Galliano, Pier Francesco, 134 Garin, Eugene, 66 gender feminine spirituality accessible to men and women, 158–159 gender fluidity, 124, 128, 130–132 “gender refuge”, 130 See also men; women geography, 7 Gerard, Cornelis, 142, 144 gifts, 125–127, 146, 157, 211 Gilbert, Felix, 199 Gilles, Peter, 21 , 27, 37, 38, 51 –52, 141 Gillespie, Vincent, 37 Giustiniani, Tomasso, 89–90, 133–135, 144 Gleason, Elisabeth, 94–95 Gleason, John, 144 Goldberg, Jonathan, 120–122, 208, 222 Goldgar, Anne, 167–168 Goldsmith, Elizabeth, 136, 215 Gonell, William, 20 Gonzaga, Cecilia, 90 Gonzaga, Giulia, 106 Gonzaga, Leonora, 160 Goodman, Dena, 168–169 Gouwens, Kenneth, 73 Grafton, Anthony, 66, 117 Greenblatt, Stephen, 21 , 43 Gregory, Brad, 149 Grendler, Paul, 187 Habermas, Jürgen, 12, 148, 166–169 hagiography. See saints Hale, John, 55 Hankins, James, 113 heaven as limit concept, 118–119 Heloise, 162 Henry VII, 57, 59–60 Henry VIII appeal to More’s loyalty, 26 credited by More for patronage, 43 and Pole, 6, 55–60, 137, 150 “politics of intimacy”, 57 scholarly status of, 61 –63, 79–80, 186 heresy, 46–47, 81 , 107, 140, 155, 204 Holbein, Hans, 120, 151 Hollywood, Amy, 122 humanism books as acquaintance, 213 Bossy on Christian humanism, 172 “courtly” phase, 73

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early humanism and exceptional educated women, 159 and geography, 7 and intellectual identity, 65–68 letter-writing style, 214 letters for posterity, 132 and pedagogy, 90 and poetry, 67–68 religious ramifications of search for a space apart, 117 responses to the Sack of Rome, 73–74 and rhetoric, 3–4 rise of, 7 and scholasticism, 3, 65 and universities, 65–68, 187, 188 valuation of translation, 208 Hutson, Lorna, 141 , 158 Hutten, Ulrich von, 33 Hytholoday, Raphael, 27–28, 73 icons, 123 illumination, 105–107, 111 Imbart de la Tour, Pierre, 4 imitation, 114, 136, 145, 222 immediacy. See presence Inquisition, Roman, 107 intellect, 95–98, 99–100. See also reason intellectuals defined, 62, 171 good and bad, 78 new sociological type, 188 status and social identity, 61 –68 Isocrates, 28 Jardine, Lisa on community, identity, and status, 141 on Erasmus, 12–13, 31 , 45, 113 on evolution from Republic of Letters to modernity, 148 on humanism, 66, 117 on portraits of friends, 183 Jerome and Erasmus, 23, 24, 44–45, 114 on letters, 46 penitent and scholar, 88, 115 reading as possession, 47 works falsely attributed to, 52 John a Wood, 53 John of Damascus, 123 Julius II, 73 Kaufman, Eleanor, 147–148, 164 Keen, Jill Averil, 205

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Kieckhefer, Richard, 163, 223 kinship, 5, 9, 20, 26, 57, 121 Le Goff, Jacques, 66 Lee, Edward, 41 Leigh, Joyce, 19, 36 Leo X, 69 Leonicus (Niccolo` Leonico Tomeo), 68–69 Lerer, Seth, 141 letters and friendship, 46–50, 69–70, 74–78, 89, 127–129 history of, 214 for posterity, humanist tradition of, 132 as presence, for More, 141 See also More, Thomas: friendship with Erasmus Leyser, Conrad, 221 Liebenwein, Wolfgang, 206 light. See illumination Linacre, Thomas, 65 literati. See intellectuals Longolius, Christopher, 70–71 love for Colonna, 86, 101 –102, 109, 123–125 in Contarini, 92, 95, 96, 97–98, 199 in Erasmus, 49 for More, 16 and patronage, 59, 184 for Pole and Sadoleto, 77–78 in Roper, 122 See also emotion; friendship Lupset, Thomas, 71 –72 Luther, Martin, 2–3, 5, 46–47, 144–145 Magdalia, 14–15, 17–19, 163 Manley, Laurence, 21 Marc’hadour, Germain, 122 Marco da Cremona, 154 Marguerite de Navarre, 7, 125, 127–129, 159–160 Marius, Richard, 37 Marshall, Cynthia, 209 Martines, Lauro, 184 martyrs Pole indebted to, 56 praised, 11 , 147–148 and scholarship, 62, 148–151 as source of knowledge, 79–81 , 149 See also Fisher, John; More, Thomas Mary Magdalene, 14–15, 122–123 masculinity. See men

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Mayer, Thomas on poetry in Pole’s circle, 68 on Pole’s identity as nobleman, 60 on Pole’s sexuality, 83, 130–131 , 193 on Pole and Valdesian views, 107 mediation friends as connection to God, 90, 123–125, 128–129, 132–136 saints as connection to God, 122–123 men Christianization of civic masculinity, 221 masculine identity in rabbinical Judaism, 221 masculinity and feminine spirituality, 158–159 work life outside monasticism, 10 men and women of letters. See intellectuals Michelangelo aversion to gifts, 125–126, 211 Christ and the Woman of Samaria at the Well, 125 Christ on the Cross, 125 Pietà drawing for Colonna, 125 relationship with Colonna, 109–110, 123–127, 161 –162 Migiel, Marilyn, 108–109 Miller, Peter, 148, 167 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, 93 monasticism and academia, 166 and aristocracy, 64 as deficient in friendship, 21 –24 Erasmus’s experience and disillusionment, 22, 142, 223 Giustiniani and Querini, 89–91 , 132–136 and the life of the ideal bishop, 155–156 versus scholarship, 14–15, 144 and the sixteenth-century search for meaning, 2 traditions of reading in, 10, 87, 93–94, 112 transformed into humanism, 67 Vitrier’s life, 164–165 Montanism, 140 More, Margaret. See Roper, Margaret More More, Thomas, 5–6 City of God, 34 and community, 8–9, 16–19, 20, 37–42, 53–54, 81 –83; (see also More, Thomas: friendship with Erasmus) In Defense of Humanism, 41 Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, 47, 139–140, 151 Dialogue Concerning Heresies, 46 early publications, 27

on education, 20–21 and Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent, 137–138 and foolishness, 82, 138–139, 141 , 151 –153 on friendship: versus brotherhood, 21 –22; and presence, 50–53, 141 , 183; and scholarly identity, 40–42 friendship with Erasmus, 25, 32, 38, 40–41 on heresy and language, 46–47 in Holbein’s sketch, 120, 151 Last Things, 136 Letter to Dorp, 41 Letter to Lee, 41 Letter to a Monk, 41 Letter to Oxford, 41 Life of Pico, 15–16, 17, 18–19, 20–21 , 27, 36, 51 and Luther, 46, 47 and new forms of religious life, 7, 8–9, 16–19 poetic writings, 68 Pole indebted to, 56 political life and affiliations, 26–28, 32–37 on presence and absence, 50–53, 141 , 183 in prison, 46–47, 81 –83, 118–119, 151 Responsio ad Lutherum, 46 in Roper’s eroticized relationships, 121 –122 on Roper, 20–21 On the Sadness of Christ, 47 scholarly identity and friendship, 40–42 scholarly retreat, 86, 115 scholarship: Erasmus on More’s scholarship, 37; as learned martyr, 56, 62, 79–81 , 148, 149–151; as religious praxis, 8–9, 42–43; spiritualized, 8–9; and virtue, 15–16, 45 on standards of speech, 138–139 Treatise on the Passion, 47 Utopia, 25–28, 39, 41 , 43 Utopia: echoed in Sadoleto, 73 Utopia: publication of, 29, 37, 38–39 on wisdom, 21 Morone, Giovanni, 130 motherhood, imagery of, 130–131 Mountjoy, William Blount, Lord, 61 –62 mysticism, 108 Nagel, Alexander, 110, 126–127, 212 neoplatonism, 102–106, 123, 147 in Colonna’s poetry, 101 , 102, 105 Newman, Barbara, 161 Nicolini, Benedetto, 200–201 , 205 nominalism, 172 Nun of Kent (Barton, Elizabeth), 137–138

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Oberman, Heiko, 3 Ochino, Bernardino, 106, 107 O’Malley, John 1 , 144 Origen, 114 Orsini, Camillo, 130–131 Ossola, Carlo, 202, 205 Ovid: Metamorphoses, 105 ownership. See possession Pace, Richard, 52 Padua, 57, 63, 65, 68–72, 88 Patenson, Henry, 151 –152 patronage, 29, 31 , 55–60, 73, 168, 184. See also flattery; politics Paul, Saint, as model of spiritual exegesis, 114 Peiresc, Nicolas Claude Fabri de, 167, 169 Petrarch, Francesco, 66–68, 101 , 115, 136, 147 books as extended acquaintance, 213 conversion account, 145 and new forms of religious life, 7 poetic theology, 102 rediscovery of Cicero’s letters, 214 Rime sparse, 104 “Petrarchan culture of desire”, 132 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 15–16, 19, 51 , 102 Oration on the dignity of man, 15 See also More, Thomas: Life of Pico Pietà, 110–111 , 125 Plato on community and discourse, 217 in Contarini’s reading and reading plans, 86, 94, 112–113, 155–156 in Erasmus, 37 Leonicus as student of, 68 as mascot for Italian humanists, 206 in More, 27 Pole as student of, 72 poetry, 67–68, 102–103, 156, 194. See also Colonna, Vittoria Pole, Reginald, 6–7, 9–10 and Colonna, 83–84, 107, 130–131 , 132, 136, 154, 163 on consolation, 136–137, 163 Defense of the Unity of the Church (De Unitate), 55–60 and Erasmus, 71 –72 and Henry VIII, 55–60 and Marco da Cremona, 154 on martyrdom and scholarship, 56, 79–81 , 148–151 possible heresies, 107, 204 on Roper, 146 and Sadoleto, 74–78

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253

on Sampson, 80 scholarship, education, and learned community, 60–63, 65, 68–72, 86 sexuality and genderedness, 130–132, 193 and Starkey, 57–59 politeness, 166, 168 politics Bembo on, 69 Contarini’s public service and private studies, 94–98 Erasmus on, 28–37 and friendship, 25–26 political context for the Republic of Letters, 166–167 See also patronage Pomponazzi, Pietro, 95, 195–196 possession, 141 –142, 143 poverty as ideal, 39 praise based on love versus judgment, 77 of bishops, 154–158 and communal identity, 11 “delirious praise”, 147–148 and friendship, 4 as flattery, 3, 29 of fools, 151 –154 as locative, 154–158, 164–165 of martyrs, 150–151 and religious exceptionalism, 147–148 of saints, 163–164 as suspect, 40 of women, 146–148, 163 prayer, solitary, 122 presence, 47, 50–53, 126, 132–136, 141 presentation drawings, 126–127 prestige. See status privatization versus community, 126–127 Protestantism, 3, 11 –12, 107, 149. See also Luther, Martin purity in texts, 48 Pythagoras, 217 Querini, Vincenzo, 89–91 , 133–136 Quintilian, 121 Rambuss, Richard, 131 , 194 Ranieri, Concetta, 106 reading Colonna: Scripture and the “Book of the Cross”, 111 –115 Contarini: reading plan, 86–94, 112–113 and emotional response, 91 –94, 114–115 identical to way of life, 89–91 as possession, 47–48

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reading (cont.) reading authors, 113–115 as retreat, 86–88, 115–117 as spiritual act, 10–11 , 50 and spiritual literature, 198 stimulus and challenge, 98 techniques of, 93–94 traditions of, in monasticism, 10, 87, 93–94, 112 transformative, 113–115 See also scholarship; Scripture; writing reason, 16–19, 79–81 , 133–134, 167. See also intellect Regensburg, 6 religion privatization versus community, 127 and the Republic of Letters, 169–170 as source of dissension, 169 religious life, new forms of, 7–8, 22–24. See also community Rene of Ferrara, 160 “representation anxiety”, 61 Republic of Letters, 12–13, 166–170 rhetoric and appearances, 74–78 and humanism, 3–4, 66 More on standards of speech, 138–139 and philosophy, 74–78, 90, 196 words and spiritualized scholarship, 46–53 See also praise; scholarship: classical Ricouer, Paul, 87 Roes, Alexander of, 63 Roniger, Luis, 9–10, 59 Roper, Margaret More, 5–6, 120–122 admired and praised, 65, 146, 164 correspondence with More in prison, 82–83, 151 –152 Devout treatise upon the Pater noster, 121 education of, 21 , 163 listening to Christ, 164 model for Magdalia, 17 Roper, William, 26, 42, 139 Rowland, Ingrid, 188 Rüegg, Walter, 65 Rummel, Erika, 78 Russell, Rinaldina, 194 Ryan, Christopher, 124 Sadoleto, Jacopo, 70, 72–79 saints, 122–123, 137, 163–164, 223 Salutati, Coluccio, 67, 102, 135 Sampson, Richard, 80, 150

August 10, 2005

Sannazzaro, Jacopo, 101 , 106 De partu virginis, 101 Lamentatio Christi, 106 Santini, G., 188 Sauvage, Jean le, 30 Savonarola, Girolamo, 16, 19, 102 schism and community, 78–85 Schluchter, Wolfgang, 211 scholarship ambivalence towards, 1 –2, 15–16, 37, 45–50, 97–98 classical, 28–29, 153, 161 , 163, 203 (see also Aristotle; Plato) ; defended in Antibarbari, 44, 144, 182; as opposed to Christianity and Christian literature, 74, 89–94; as preparation for Scripture, 49, 90; and Christian, as joint education, 15, 24, 142, 143–144, 155–156, 182 and the creation of community, 8, 16–19, 20, 24, 68–72, 142 and emotional transformation, for Erasmus, 115 friendship based on, 33 and the ideal bishop, in Contarini, 155–156 and integrity, for Sadoleto, 78–79 legal rights of scholars, 63 and martyrdom, 62, 79–81 , 149–151 and monasticism,14–15, 23–24, 142, 144, 169 and patronage, 56 and the place of religion, 12–13 versus politics, 27–28, 33, 95 scholar as guide to purity, for Erasmus, 50 scholarly retreat, 115–117 spiritualized, 1 –2, 8, 20, 37–42, 46–53, 170; and fools, 153–154; and praise, 147–148; as religious praxis, 42–50; versus worldly, 34–35, 36–37 as standard, for Contarini, 95 and status, 29–32, 37–42, 60–68, 70, 74–78; of martyrs, 79–81 , 149–151 scholasticism, 3, 39–40, 65 Screech, Michael, 140–141 Scripture in Augustine’s conversion account, 145 Biblical psalms as songs of praise, 147 Carmeliano’s devotion to, 39 Colet’s reading regimen, 165 in Colonna’s poetry, 87, 100, 200–201 Contarini’s reading plan, 86, 90–93, 94, 112–113 for Erasmus, absorption in, 44 Erasmus on reading Scripture, 113–115 Erasmus’s scriptural exegesis, 143–144

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inferior to the “Book of the Cross”, 105 inferior to the words of the martyrs, 79, 149 in the life of the ideal bishop, 155–156 methods of spiritual discernment, 111 –115 for More, interpretation guaranteed by consensus, 81 in More’s Life of Pico, as sole word of God, 16 in More’s Utopia, multiple scriptures, 25 More’s warning against translation of, 46–48 and purity, 46–48, 49, 50 self-control in the Republic of Letters, 167 self-expression in letter-writing, 46 Shannon, Laurie, 131 Sheehan, Jonathan, 208 Shuger, Debora, 12–13 sincerity, 136, 215 skepticism, 3 Smalley, Beryl, 112 solitude, 115–117 spirituali, 4 spirituality, feminine, accessible to men and women, 158–159. See also scholarship: spiritualized Stampa, Gaspara, 7 Stapleton, Thomas, 120–121 Starkey, David, 57 Starkey, Thomas, 57–58, 59, 150 Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, 58 status, 29–32, 37–42, 60–68, 70, 74–78 status of learned martyrs, 79–81 , 149–151 Struever, Nancy, 32, 213 studies convergence of treasury and cell, 206 Sadoleto’s study ransacked, 83 site of scholarly retreat, 87–88, 115, 116 site of spiritual value, 116 as utopia, 194 women’s, 194 Studium as third power, 63 Tasso, Bernardo, 146 Tomeo, Niccolo` Leonico, 68–69 Tracy, James, 2, 23, 50 translation, 46–48, 121 , 208 truth and poetry, 67 Tudors, “politics of intimacy”, 57 Tunstall, Cuthbert, 38, 39 Tyndale, William, 81 universities, 2, 67 “crisis of oversupply”, 64

18:21

history of, 63–65 and humanism, 65–68, 187, 188 Valdés, Juan, 106–107 Christian Alphabet, 106–107 Dialogue on Christian Doctrine, 106–107 Venice, 88–89 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 159–160 Virgil, 156 virtue and reason, 80 Viterbo, Egidio da, 106, 203 Vitrier, Jean, 164–165 Wall, Wendy, 208 Warham, William, 42–43 Weber, Max, 66–67 Weissman, Ronald, 57 will versus intellect, 95–98, 99–100 Witt, Ronald, 102 Wolsey, Thomas, 56–57, 60 women education of, 21 , 43 evidence of studies, 194 female figures in medieval allegory, 161 female prophets, 121 feminine personifications of divine wisdom, 161 feminine spirituality accessible to men and women, 158–159 fluid roles for, 131 following Colonna, 101 friendship with, 35–36 gendered exemplarity, 128 learned, 14–15, 18–19, 90, 121 , 195; in humanist circles, 116–117; in the religious republic of letters, 7; in the Republic of Letters, 168; as signs of God’s power, 159–160 praised, 11 , 146–148, 164 translation work, 208 unlearned, 137, 139 and withdrawal versus engagement, 83–85 See also gender Woolfson, Jonathan, 63, 70 Wootton, David, 25–26 Word of God. See Scripture writing on command, 212 versus conversation, 47 as religious praxis, 46, 86–88, 98–111 and spiritual meaning, 10–11 See also scholarship

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Between Utopia and Dystopia: Erasmus, Thomas More, and the Humanist Republic of Letters

Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters

The Age of Erasmus

The Epistles Of Erasmus

Erasmus of the Low Countries

Erasmus of Christendom

Herculean Labours: Erasmus and the Editing of St. Jerome's Letters in the Renaissance

Five Spice Street (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic

Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform

Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

Charles Darwin's 'The Life of Erasmus Darwin'

Perils of Empire: The Roman Republic and the American Republic

Perils of Empire: The Roman Republic and the American Republic

Erasmus Onze Groote Mannen

Religious Freedom, Religious Discrimination and the Workplace

Destiny of the Republic

Destiny of the Republic

The Republic Of Plato:

The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien

Destiny of the Republic

The Republic of Wine

The Republic of Thieves

The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien

The Garland of Letters

Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity

Religious Experience and Religious Belief

The Letters of Cicero

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