Iulius exclusus e coelis: Motive und Tendenzen gallikanischer und bibelhumanistischer Papstkritik im Umfeld des Erasmus (review)

The question of who wrote Julius Excluded from Heaven (1513 or 1514) has, like many historical questions, no simple answer and a long history of dispute. Peter Fabisch takes up the matter anew to refute the contention, especially prevalent among Anglo-American scholars, that Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote it. Rather, it was the work of one whose politics were clearly Gallican; namely, the Venetian humanist in the court of Louis XII, Fausto Andrelini. By reattributing authorship to Andrelini, Fabisch fulsomely defends the findings of Carl Stange’s Erasmus und Julius II., eine Legende (Berlin, 1937).

Part 1 of Fabisch’s study takes up the indications of Andrelini’s authorship. Among them is a letter that Andrelini wrote c. 1510 to France’s Queen Anne containing the chief complaints of the Julius: that Julius betrayed Louis’s faith by abandoning the League of Cambrai, that he was “ungrateful” for French support that yielded him success, that he was risking schism—a reference to his opposition to the Council of Pisa, which nine dissident cardinals convoked and which Louis abetted—and that he was manifestly unworthy of his office. Moreover, Andrelini had to have partaken of the other elements important to the dialogue, such as contemporary French conciliarist theories, popular Parisian comedies, the internal politics of the Council of Pisa and the Fifth Lateran Council—its officially sanctioned counterpart—and visceral personal animosity toward Julius. Erasmus, who is central to the second section, wrote nothing in his contemporary satires and letters comparably venomous or pro-French.

Fabisch does not deny that most of Erasmus’s contemporaries attributed the Julius to him and that there is “something Erasmian” about it. There is also circumstantial evidence that points to him. However, none of this mitigates the indirect nature of the evidence and the contrived conclusions drawn from it. For example, it is far easier to find “Faustus Andrelinus Foroliviensis” in “F. A. F.”—the initials on the title page of early editions of the Julius—than to figure how they pseudonymously refer to Erasmus. Even more significant, to assert Erasmus is the author is to disregard—and to have to rationalize—his repeated and consistent disavowals of any connection to the dialogue, which he criticized for its rashness and damage to his own reputation. Finally, concerning St. Thomas More’s claim to his having seen a draft of it in Erasmus’s own hand in summer 1514, Fabisch argues that this was most likely to have been a copy Erasmus made of Andrelini’s “Ur-Julius,” one that Etienne Poncher, bishop of Paris, showed him that summer.

The final part is the “History of Indiscretion and Misdirection” surrounding the dissemination and publication of the Julius. Thomas Lupset, a one-time secretary to Erasmus, and Ulrich von Hutten are the agents of the dialogue’s transmission from Erasmus’s copybook, to Italy, and on to Speyer—the site of its first publication in 1517, according to Fabisch. By 1517, the issues that originally animated the satire were dead, but what made the dialogue live on were the Reuchlin Affair and the growing animosity toward Rome that Hutten was intentionally generating in German circles. Here Fabisch rightly notes that whatever the political ends of its author may have been, the Julius served the interests of those disseminating it. And, far from being a statement of humanist reform aspirations, the whole history of the dialogue shows it to be a passionate political tract. As far as settling the question of who wrote the Julius, what can be most assuredly concluded is that Fabisch has put the matter in dispute again where, absent some revealing new evidence, it will likely remain.