Réforme protestante, Réforme catholique dans la province d'Avignon au XVIe siécle by Marc Venard (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 271 Catholics argued for married clergy, vernacular liturgy, and communion sub utraque, but Paul IV was adamant against such concessions. The most interesting documents deal with Bishop John Drohojowski of Wroclaw, who was repeatedly accused of fostering heresy—charges he denied. Similar charges were made against Bishop Andrew Zebrzydowski of Krakow. Another series ofdocuments deal with Dorothy Lazecka, who received the eucharist and was accused of selling it to several Jews; King Sigismund ordered her to be burnt. The accused Jews were also punished. My own research has involved reading the nuncios' reports from the 1 580's, in which relations with the Orthodox figured prominently—a subject about which the Lippomano documents are almost silent. Wojtyska is the leading authority in this area. This is his fourth volume in the series; in 1977 he published a volume in Polish on diplomatic relations between Poland_and the papacy from 1548 to 1563. The present volume is a work of excellent scholarship which libraries with strong collections in Polish or church history should purchase. John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. Marquette University Réforme protestante, Réforme catholique dans la province d'Avignon au XVIe siècle. By Marc Venard. [Histoire Religieuse de la France, Vol. 1.] (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. 1993. Pp. 1280. 340 F.) The appearance of this book is an event to be hailed. France's Société d'Histoire Religieuse, which from 1912 to 1977 produced the worthy "Biblioth èque d'histoire ecclésiastique de la France," has resumed sponsoring a publication series. As the inaugural volume of its new series, it has presented us with one of the finest studies ever written about the religious history of sixteenth-century Europe. Marc Venard's thèse de doctorat d'état was originally entitled "L'église d'Avignon au XVIe"* siècle" when it was completed in 1977. It was then, and remains today, the richest, most thorough, and most accomplished local study of religious life in late medieval and early modern France yet undertaken. Standing within the important French tradition of studies of the implementation of the reforms of the Council of Trent in individual dioceses that has produced so many exemplary monographs over the past three decades, it at die same time transcends that tradition, for it complements a sympathetic study of the visions of reform advanced by different religious elites and die degree to which they were implemented at the parish level with a sensitive ethnographic approach that explores what religion meant in the lives of individuals ofdifferent social backgrounds. Those who have had the good fortune to read one of the copies of the thesis that specialists have passed from hand 272 BOOK REVIEWS to hand since it was duplicated in 1980 by the Service de Reproduction des Thèses at Lille have long recognized its many merits, but its 2,466 typed pages understandably discouraged publishers. One can only applaud the decision of the Société d'Histoire Religieuse to subsidize its unrevised and virtually uncondensed publication. The study is a total religious history of the erstwhile Papal seat and its hinterland: five small bishoprics (Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, Orange, and Vaison), encompassing and sprawling slightly beyond the borders of the Comtat Venaissin and the principality of Orange. Because of Avignon's subordination to Rome, the region was recognized long ago by such historians as Henri Brémond and Paul Broutin as the initial bridgehead in France of Tridentine reform and of the "mystical invasion" that shaped the spirituality of the early part of the "century of the saints." But the region was also the home of Luther's first important French disciple, François Lambert, of numerous Waldensians, and of such a powerful Reformed movement around 1560— particularly in the principality ofOrange, where a "revolutionary Reformation" temporarily drove out Catholic worship in 1561—that a Protestant triumph was averted only by more than a year's fighting in 1562-1563. The region was thus far more than a bastion ofCatholicism. It represents a fascinating lab) oratory in which to view the religious changes of the sixteenth century, at once suigeneris because ofthe distinctive political status ofboth Avignon and Orange, yet partaking of...