Valets de Dieu, Suppôts du Diable: Ermites et Réforme catholique dans l'Espagne des Habsbourg (1550-1700) by Alain Saint-Saëns (review)

book reviews463 will help readers understand the complex history of France in the era of the Council of Trent. William V Hudon Bloomsburg University Valets de Dieu, Suppôts du Diable: Ermites et Réforme catholique dans l'Espagne des Habsbourg (1550-1700). By Alain Saint-Saëns. (New Orleans: Presses Universitaires du Nouveau Monde. 1999. Pp. 280. Paperback.) In this concise work the author examines the relative marginalization of hermits , male and female, in Counter-Reformation Spain. He is able to show without difficulty that the ecclesiastical hierarchy, meaning the episcopate as weU as the Spanish Inquisition, expressed an ever greater distrust of hermits from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. They thus became marginal not just in their literal location of choice but in relation to the settled Old Christian society of Spain (and of Portugal to 1640), more fundamentally. This was even more so in the case of vagrant'hermits,'who fell under royal edicts against vagabondage, as well as under ecclesiastical disapprobation. Though the author quotes kberafiy from contemporary literary sources, in which the image of the hermit is so often negative, he is also able to substantiate his argument from many episcopal and inquisitorial archives, which he draws on to good effect, alongside the fullest complementary references to recent secondary sources. For if fixed hermitages were often still the goal of local pilgrimages, and some foundations remained , for associated reasons, under the patronage and financial management of a neighboring communal authority, the hermit himself or herself was no longer assured of veneration, unlike the statue or relics of the saint venerated on such private or coUective pilgrimage. Traditional subordinate roles, as informal teachers or as healers, were now profoundly precarious, subject to popular denunciation as much as episcopal prohibition or inquisitorial prosecution. The isolated hermit, putting himself or herself beyond the sanctified bounds of the parish, was especiaUy vulnerable to accusations of diabolic association, despite the general caution of the Spanish Inquisition about demonic conspiracy. In the case of isolated females, hermits,whether living alone or in twos or threes, also fell under the hostility which the episcopate in Counter-Reformation Spain expressed toward beatas, even if with remarkably little success in the history of urban groups of the latter. The author is aware, however, that even with regard to male hermits post-Tridentine bishops outside Spain also tried to bring them under closer supervision, which in the Iberian peninsula was reflected in the limited duration of the licenses granted by bishops to reside in a particular location or beg for alms in a defined territory, quite apart from the effort to regulate their dress in such a way as to exclude the visual association with membership of the religious orders which hermits, even if not tertiaries, seemed determined to suggest. The isolation of the hermit, moreover, seems, in 464book reviews some of the instances analyzed here, to have left him in a similar state of genuine incomprehension of the finer points of Tridentine orthodoxy which the Spanish Inquisition detected in other necessarily marginal figures, such as shepherds . As a barely authorized part of the religious life, hardly of the institutional Church, a lay hermit pronounced on religious questions, even among a rural and uneducated population, with increasing risk to himself. A. D.Wright University ofLeeds Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland nebst ergänzenden Aktenstücken, Dritte Abteilung: 1572-1585, 8. Band: Nuntiatur Giovanni Dolflns (15751576 ) (im Auftrage des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom). Edited by Daniela Neri. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 1997. Pp. Ii, 795, DM 238.00.) This collection comprises the complete correspondence between Giovanni Dolfin, Imperial nuncio in Vienna in 1571-1578, and the papal Secretary of State, Ptolomeo GaUio, during the last years of Emperor Maximilian IFs reign (1575-76). Daniela Neri's book forms the eighth volume of a comprehensive edition of the German nunciature's correspondence in the reign of Gregory XIII (1572-1585). Like the preceding issues in this series, the present volume is furnished with an instructive description of the state of documentation and the specific editorial problems encountered. There is also a useful summary of the main subjects of the correspondence. The editor plausibly argues that recent papal...