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562 BOOK REVIEWS relevant. Some eighty pages of detailed notes, an up-to-date bibliography, a cogent and insightful presentation of subject matter are all evidence of critical writing at its best. Bruno M. Damiani The Catholic University ofAmerica The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation. By Erika Rummel. [Harvard Historical Studies, 120.] (Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press. 1995. Pp. x, 249. $45.00.) The noisy controversies between humanists and scholastic theologians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may represent an irrepressible conflict between two fundamentally opposed views of human knowledge, or they may have been little more than a collision between an entrenched academic establishment and a band of ambitious youths, more a struggle over place and power than a collision between rival intellectual positions. The author of this learned and judicious book finds that this was serious intellectual business, not just petty squabbling. She identifies three stages in the confrontation. The first stage filled the fifteenth century and included the famous debate between the humanist Salutati and the Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici, as well as contributions from figures like Leonardo Bruni, Pico della Mirándola, Ermolao Bárbaro, and the youthful Erasmus. This stage raised issues that persisted, such as the value of dialectic in theology, the relative merit of patristic and scholastic authorities , and the utility of classical learning. In general, these early debates were moderate in tone. As humanism spread into northern Europe about 1500, however, the humanists' pressure for significant reforms in university curricula called forth a sharper tone, probably because questions of power and prestige were at stake. In this second stage, theological faculties became the center ofresistance to change. The authority-claims of the theologians made it inevitable that pressures for reform of theology would elicit not only opposition but even questions about the critics' orthodoxy. Rummers description of the theologians ' claims to exclusive authority over discussion of many subjects is especially important, because humanism presented itself as a universally valid intellectual method for all studies that rested on authoritative ancient texts: that is, for all university subjects. By claiming a prior right to apply their linguistic and philological skills to the text of the textbooks, humanists were claiming authority in all fields. The climax of this second stage came with attacks on those humanists—notably Erasmus and Lefèvre—who applied their linguistic and philological skills to scripture and who sought to turn theology toward the Bible and the Church Fathers and away from the scholastic doctors. Rummel gives considerable attention to the defenders of orthodoxy, one of whom was rude enough to discount Pope Leo X's endorsement of Erasmus' New Testament by pointing out that Leo had no theological training. Both the nature of theological education and the locus of authority were at issue; and Rummel's BOOK REVIEWS 563 theologians were not bashful about claiming effective control of Catholic doctrine . The third, most harsh phase of the debate began with the outbreak of the Reformation. Catholic humanists were in an especially awkward position. Conservatives laid the blame for the new heresies squarely on them. A valuable chapter analyzes the humanists' critique of scholastic dialectic, beginning with the work ofValla and Agrícola and continuing into the new century withVives, Melanchthon, Ramus, and Nizolius. Rummel shows that several of these critics aimed beyond scholasticism at the authority of Aristotle himself, early hints of the following epoch's repudiation ofAristotelian rationalism. Charles G. Nauert,Jr. University ofMissouri-Columbia Early Modern European From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft ofDying in Sixteenth-Century Spain. By Carlos M. N. Eire. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xiv, 571. $4995.) In all our lives there comes a time when thoughts of death and human mortality become particularly intense. Carlos Eire's book, From Madrid to Purgatory , records the multifaceted history of Spain's epochal fascination with death. It is Eire's concern, in this long and detailed study, to demonstrate not only the ways in which mortuary rituals were conceived and crafted in sixteenth-century Spain, but to suggest that the enormous amount of time, effort, and money devoted to these rituals revealed a compulsive...

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