The Preacher's Demons. Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy by Franco Mormando (review)

BOOK REVIEWS621 This volume is divided into three parts. The first is largely a chronicle of Joan's story. From her first appearance at Vaucouleurs where Robert de Baudricourt told the male relative with whom she traveled to slap Joan and take her home, we follow Joan to the dauphin and through military successes, capture, trial, and execution. The trial in 1456 that nullified her earlier condemnation is also described. There is some satisfaction in this chapter, especially given the venom with which Bishop Pierre Cauchon, his colleagues, and their Parisian advisers treated Joan. They distorted her responses, denied her appeal to the pope, and conducted a procedure that was so irregular in so many ways that its verdict was easily reversed, especially given the testimony of a large number of witnesses from 1431 who were still alive to set the record straight a quarter century later. The book's second part is a series of sixty-nine character portraits of the three principal nobles in Joan's story (Charles VII, Henry VI, and Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy), their subjects, and Joan's Rouen judges. The entries in this and the book's third part are arranged in double columns that function like an encyclopedia. The third part considers eighteen contentious images and issues, including Joan's name, family, impostors, trial records, and appearances in popular culture. Appendices provide texts of Joan's letters in French and English, a timeline, maps, and schematics of important cities and castles in her life. Adams has added his own preface, several of the character portraits (notably the entry on Philip the Good), and an excellent prelude that in five pages makes sense of the enormously complex and overlapping loyalties of the French civil war, the Hundred Years' War, and the Great Western Schism. Adams reworked and updated the bibliography, but he still directs readers to the original bibliography in the 1986 French edition because of its analysis of sources. Joan ofArc: Her Story will serve the general public well and be put to very good use in the classroom. The lack of notes, while annoying, is partially amended by the informal hints and suggestions the authors include along the way. This volume functions as a primer onJoan for undergraduate and graduate students: its three parts tell the story clearly and reflect its natural drama without being cloying, give detailed accounts of the players, and judiciously deal with key controversies. It may be considered the place to begin for novices as well as a resource of measured conclusions and future directions for more advanced readers. Christopher M. Beixitto St.Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie The Preacher's Demons. Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy. By Franco Mormando. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1999- Pp. xvi, 364. $29.00.) As is clearly shown in this well-written, thoroughly documented study, few historical figures of fifteenth-century Italy have come up smelling like roses at 622book reviews the hands of historians quite like the Observant Franciscan,Bernardino of Siena. But in fact, Bernardino was a rhetorical assassin, encouraging his listeners to denounce and even to kill those who did not meet with his approval. To prove this point, Franco Mormando begins with a solid overview of the Bernardinian manuscript and printed tradition. He then proceeds to study in separate chapters the preacher's attitudes toward witches, sodomites, andJews. There is little new here regarding Bernardino for those scholars who have studied any of these three topics in fifteenth-century Italy, though Mormando's discovery that the preacher largely steered clear of denouncing Jews, certainly on papal urging, is significant . Still, the cumulative impact of this overview of Bernardino's sermonizing in these areas will be profound for all readers. Mormando shows us a preacher who imagined the smoke of a witch's flesh to be incense offered the Christian God! Bernardino was indeed a mordant poet of the Christian grotesque! In a couple of pages the author tries to explain the Bernardinian phenomenon as resulting from the sense of crisis that enveloped his age—schism and the like, but that argument is circular; the author's heart is in...