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BOOK REVIEWS119 Lovers of John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Edward WilUam Elgar (1857-1934) wUl find the second part of this book especiaUy engaging, as Dr. Young traces the genesis ofNewman's beautiful poem from a youthful desire to "make a poem on Faith. ... To end with a feint imagination of the soul just freed from the bonds of the mortal body" to its enfleshment, wondrousty in a single night UiJanuary, 1865, as The Dream ofGerontius. Newman dedicated it, fittingly, to the memory of the Birmingham Oratorian Joseph Gordon (1812-1853), who, though mortally ill, had labored to assist Newman in the "great anxiety" of his trial for criminal Ubel. The CathoUc composer Elgar set Newman's "solemn and mystic" poem to music for the Birmingham Festival in October, 1900. Its successful performance at the Düsseldorf Festival in Germany in 1902 earned Richard Stauss's verdict that "with that work England for the first time became one of the modern musical states." Although the oratorio became recognized as a classic, some of its renditions over the years at the Worcester Festivals, where its text was grossly subjected to mutilations and alterations deemed necessary by Protestant "susceptibiUties ,"testify to the perdurance of that anti-CathoHc discrimination, even in the arts. Dr. Young weU proposes a critical edition of Newman's writings on music. A single caveat I would hazard: that he marshal his details and keep them in line lest they tend to obscure his theme(s), as they do in this small volume. E. Leo McMannus Venice, Florida Correspondance de Giovanni Battista de Rossi et de Louis Duchesne (18731894 ). Edited by Patrick Saint-Roch. [CoUection de L'École Française de Rome, 205.] (Rome: L'École Française de Rome. 1995. Pp. 729) "At that time [1847], as the result of the excavations of De Rossi Ui the catacombs , it was piously styUsh to secure as a reUc the body of a martyr." This observation of the biographer of BasU Anthony Moreau, whUe chronologicaUy inaccurate, testifies to the justifiably celebrated reputation De Rossi earned as the "Father ofChristian Archaeology," his chieffeme stemming from his work in the Roman catacombs. In 1847, however, De Rossi was only twenty-five-years old and had not yet begun the research that would bring him such feme and estabUsh such pious, if for some tastes rather grisly, styles; indeed, at that date he had just finished his legal studies. Twenty-six years later, however, when young Louis Duchesne wrote him for the first time—requesting a recommendation for admittance to the Chigi Library —De Rossi's professional achievement was already manifest. The flood of his scholarly pubUcations was at high tide, and his uncovering—Uterally—of la 120BOOK REVIEWS Roma sotterranea had revolutionized the methodologies traditionaUy employed Ui the study of the primitive Church. He had, moreover, estabUshed contacts with some ofthe greatest European scholars ofhis time: Cardinals Mai and Pitra had been his teachers,Bartolomeo Borghese his coUeague, and he counted among his intimates and coUaborators the likes ofMommsen and Kraus, DeUsIe and Le Blant, Northcote and Brownlow. For the last twenty-one years ofDe Rossi's life,Louis Duchesne joined this august company, but not, to be sure, on an equal footing. When this correspondence began,Duchesne, at the age ofthirty,had just emerged from his studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and had assumed a juniorposition at the newly opened École Française de Rome. His thesis—a critical edition of the Liber Pontificalis of the sixth century—had been weU received in learned circles, whUe some of its conclusions appeared alarmingly daring in hierarchical ones. As his distinguished career unfolded, climaxing with election as an Immortal ofthe Academy,Duchesne was to skid into trouble more than once with ecclesiastical authority, though, unlike his most famous pupU, Alfred Loisy, he managed to maintain his clerical status. What provided occasion for these 594 letters—Duchesne's manuscripts preserved at the Vatican, De Rossi's at the BibUothèque Nationale—and indeed what bound them together for a generation was theU common dedication to historical science. Though they coUaborated in only one pubUcation—the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (1894...

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