Byzantine Scholars in Renaissance Italy: Cardinal Bessarion and Other Emigrés. Selected Essays by John Monfasani (review)

BOOK REVIEWS95 lyzes the volume of imports into Rome during a Jubilee year. The influx of pilgrims for the holy year caused a noticeable spike upwards in imports of food and wine. Moreover,the cost ofhousing,food, and drink also edged higher. Esch concludes that local Roman businessmen owed much of their economic success to the papal presence in the city. Mario Caravale investigates how the Apostolic Camera increased its ability to collect revenues from the Papal States in the Renaissance. Martin V improved the efficiency of the papal fiscal system when he established five provincial treasuries to oversee papal finances throughout the papal lands. However,papal bureaucrats never attempted to impose a uniform fiscal system on papal holdings . Some areas like Rome and Bologna,were subject to direct fiscal control by the local apostolic treasuries. In other areas like Perugia,local civic officials continued to exercise fiscal control, yet paid substantial taxes into papal coffers. The papal fiscal system became increasingly efficient from 1450 to 1525,with a corresponding increase in revenues from the Papal States. While not exhausting the topics covered in this volume, tiiis brief survey reveals the richness of this collection. Roma Capitale makes a substantial contribution to the study of Renaissance Rome by bringing together a number of different scholarly perspectives crafted by the major scholars in the field. Many of the articles overlap, which helps the reader to reconstruct the complex nature ofRoman society and culture under the papal prince. This is a work whose very strength is its breadth of coverage—it will prove indispensable both as a reference work and in stimulating further research in the field. Ronald K. Delph Eastern Michigan University Byzantine Scholars in Renaissance Italy:Cardinal Bessarion and Other Emigr és. Selected Essays. By John Monfasani. [Collected Studies Series.] (Brookneld,Vermont: Variorum, Ashgate Publishing Co. 1995. Pp. xii, 351.) This is the second of two collections of his articles that John Monfasani has recently published in Variorum's "Collected Studies Series." The first volume , Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy, contains his articles on fifteenth-century humanism. The present volume contains fourteen articles in English and Italian on Byzantine émigré scholars in Quattrocento Italy,all previously published, including nine articles on Cardinal Bessarion and his circle. In addition to Bessarion, the volume contains studies dealing with Niccolö Perotti, Theodore Gaza, Plefho, Alexius Celadenus, Andronicus Contoblacas, Andronicus Callistus, Nicholas Secundums, and numerous other figures. The articles are rather spottily updated in a four-page appendix, but the author adds a useful index of manuscripts and an index nominum. All of the articles display Professor Monfasani's deep learning and brilliant skills in textual and historical criticism ; with their publication, he inherits Deno John Geanakoplos' place as the 96BOOK REVIEWS leading American authority on the emigration ofByzantine intellectuals to Renaissance Italy. Much of this volume consists of detailed textual studies of the works of Bessarion and his 'academy,' including hitherto unpublished texts of Bessarion, Gaza, Callistus, and others, collations of new manuscripts of previously published texts, manuscript descriptions, paleographical data, and rich new material on the textual tradition ofBessarion's writings. There is also important new biographical information on Bessarion, Niccolö Perotti, and Andronicus Callistus . Beyond tliis, we are given an intimate view of Bessarion's struggles to enter the new linguistic environment of Latin humanism. From the Council of Ferrara-Florence onwards, Bessarion's three great causes -were the union of the Greek and Latin churches, the preservation of the Greek cultural heritage, and the launching ofa crusade against the Turks to recover Constantinople. In order to compass these ends, Bessarion needed the ability to write persuasively in Latin and to defend, against numerous detractors, his image as a pious, orthodox , and loyal prince of the Roman Church. Though competent enough in the Italian and Küchenlatein of the papal court, Bessarion never really developed first-rate skills as a writer of Latin prose. Monfasani shows the important role played by Niccolö Perotti in translating or transforming many of Bessarion's controversial and scholarly writings into good humanistic Latin; Perotti's lost biography of Bessarion, as Monfasani demonstrates, was probably the most important source for the encomiastic biographical tradition of...