Medieval and Renaissance Letter Treatises and Form Letters. A Census of Manuscripts Found in Part of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States of America by Emil J. Polak (review)

BOOK REVIEWS89 scription of how Anna Laminit deceived practically every member of the imperial court until her fraud was uncovered. The cases are consistently fascinating, and they open new vistas into the complicated relationships between confessors and penitents, between inquisitors and the accused, between official definitions and the sensusfidelium. I cannot recommend this volume highly enough. Like any good book, of course, it raised further questions. Ofall the authors, onlyJean-Michel Sallmann examined any cases of sanctity supposedly simulated by men. Further comparisons would surely be enlightening. I was struck, moreover, that in effect only Prosperi mentioned Erasmus as pertinent to the evolution of the new ideal. No one spoke more insistently that the Prince of the Humanists on social virtue as constitutive of what it meant to be a good Christian—or had less to say about mystical experience. Teresa of Avila's name occurs often in the volume, but in passing. Central to the new ideal was obedience—to one's superiors, to one's confessor—as the litmus test of sanctity rather than rapture and ecstasy. Teresa herself vigorously espoused this viewpoint, and I do not think it can be attributed to her writings being "forced" (coacta) from her by her confessors, to use Romeo De Maio's expression quoted by Schutte (p. 330). It would therefore be helpful to correlate the writings of Teresa and her like with the other evidence and arguments so ably presented in this volume. John W. O'Malley, SJ. WestonJesuit School of Theology Medieval and Renaissance Letter Treatises and Form Letters. A Census of Manuscripts Found in Part of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States ofAmerica. By Emil J. Polak. [Davis Medieval Texts and Studies, Volume IX.] (Leiden: E.J. BrUl. 1994. Pp. xvii, 475.) This volume constitutes the second part of a monumental effort to publish organized inventories of the extant manuscript evidence relating to the medieval arts of letter-writing and secular oratory, the ars dictaminis and the ars arengandi. The results of Professor Polak's research for France, Austria, (West) Germany, and Italy, whose libraries contain the richest coUections of manuscripts on these arts, wiU be pubUshed in a third volume. The present volume, like its predecessor dealing with Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (see ante, LXXX [January, 1994], 139—141), is largely a result of the author's visit to hundreds of libraries in Western Europe and the United States. In the cases ofJapan and Greece, however, the information was obtained by correspondence. As with the first volume, the manuscript census includes ( 1 ) the ars dictaminis with its treatises, manuals, and die- 90BOOK REVIEWS tamina or model letter collections; (2) the ars epistolandi, the art of letterwriting of the Renaissance humanists (fourteenth to seventeenth century); and (3) the related art of ars arengandi or the art of secular oratory for judicial, political, academic, and social purposes, together with model speech collections or arenge. Compared with the first two categories, the number of manuscripts in the third is relatively small, because this genre of rhetoric was largely limited to the central and northern Italian communes. I particularly wish to acknowledge Professor Polak's wisdom in including Renaissance material in his census of manuscripts. Scholars have come to see that there was no sharp break between medieval and Renaissance letter-writing as was formerly believed and that in the area of official correspondence medieval formulae appear to have persisted down to the end of the fifteenth century. Professor Polak's census will be of special importance in the study ofthe stylistic developments in this latter category ofletter in the early modern period. When completed, these volumes wiU be the indispensable guides to that which in many areas ofWestern Europe provided the fundamental orientation for the study of rhetoric in the Middle Ages. Even where Cicero's De inventione and the Pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium were taught as well, their lessons were used selectively according to the needs of the medieval arts. Professor Polak's census in its finished form will document almost twenty-five hundred manuscripts written from the twelfth to the seventeen century in an area running from England to the present-day Czech Republic...