Julius II: The Warrior Pope by Christine Shaw (review)

96BOOK REVIEWS Lorenzo Valla, whose writings from his Neapolitan days challenged not just the pretensions of the religious but even the filioque. (Interested scholars also should read Riccardo Fubini, "Lorenzo VaUa tra U Concilio di BasUea e quello di Firenze, e il processo deU'Inquisizione," in Conciliarismo, stati nazionali, inizi dell'umanesimo [Spoleto: Centro di Studi suU'Alto Medieoevo , 1990].) Also of importance are "A Description of the Sistine Chapel under Pope Sixtus IV," which helps us date the construction and the earlier works of art more accurately, and "Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in MidQuattrocento Rome," which casts light on "the Renaissance unmasking of the Dionysian corpus as apocryphal." I caU particular attention to the concluding study, "The Fraticelli and Clerical Wealth in Quattrocento Rome," because it highlights the tensions between the professed ideals of the vita apostólica, represented by the mendicants, and the curial ethos, ¦which differed little in its attitude toward wealth and display from the courts ofprinces. Anyone who has read Pius IPs unsympathetic account ofNicholas ofCusa's outburst against curial opposition to reform is aware of how this conflict of values helped undermine Rome in the period culminating in the Reformation crisis. (A bit more might have been done with the FraticeUi problem during the reign of Nicholas V, especiaUy the trial in Fabriano; see Charles Burroughs, From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome [Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990].) Some of Monfasani's articles are hard to foUow because of their technical detail, but there are important insights offered even in these. The best, however, including "The First Call for Press Censorship," can be read with both enjoyment and profit. As usual, Variorum's price is painful for the individual to contemplate. Thomas M. Izbicki Johns Hopkins University Early Modern European Julius II: The Warrior Pope. By Christine Shaw. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell. 1993. Pp. viii, 360; 23 black and white plates. »3995.) As the title of this book suggests, Christine Shaw views Julius II (ca. 1445— 1513, pope from 1503) as primarily a political figure whose preferred tools for achieving his primary goal of restoring the temporal authority of the pope over the Papal States were diplomacy and warfare. WhUe her central thesis may seem to have come out of nineteenth-century historiography, her treatment is at times original because she has used new sources and challenged a number of oft-repeated dicta about this pope. Shaw's research has been conductedprincipally in contemporary diplomatic reports: mostly printed coUections for Florence, Venice, Spain, France, and BOOK REVIEWS97 the Empire, and archival materials for Milan, Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. Her use of the previously neglected reports of die agents of the Sforzas and Gonzagas has aUowed her to trace in detail Giuliano deUa Rovere's checkered career as a cardinal and to detect patterns of behavior that would continue into his pontificate. Because these reports concentrated on poUtical affairs, the image of deUa Rovere that emerges is almost exclusively that of a poUtical figure. Given her topic of the forty-two-year career of a cardinal and pope, her work in the Vatican Library and Archives is surprisingly limited—she provides only twenty references to five codices of papal briefs in the Vatican Secret Archives and cites not one of the over one-hundred Vatican Registers for the pontificate of Julius II. On the basis offirsthand diplomatic reports, Shaw is able to chaUenge some commonly held views about Julius II. She finds little evidence for the claim mat as a young cardinal he was serious, studious, and sober, and notes instead his penchant for display, lack of academic interests, and affair witíi a mistress that begot his daughter Felice. WhUe he later provided for FeUce an Orsini husband and for a niece and nephew other Roman matches, he tempered his nepotism. He appointed never more than two nephews at a time to the Sacred College and was restrained in conferring on his ungrateful and disloyal nephew Francesco Maria deUe Rovere fiefdoms in the Papal States. His relatives had Uttle influence in shaping papal policy, and he seldom used mem to win support for his plans. Nonetheless, his concern to further...