Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe 1500–1620 by Arnoud S. Q. Visser (review)

For more than a millennium after his death in 530 Augustine of Hippo was a fundamental figure in the intellectual life of the West. David Steinmetz, a major figure in recent Augustinian studies, has expressed it well, suggesting that in one of its many senses the word Augustinianism simply designates the theology of the Latin West. The flexibility of Augustinianism, which is the focus of Visser’s study, is an inescapable consequence of the durability of his authoritative status at least as much as it is caused by the variety of the opinions and attitudes revealed in his vast authorship, which often evolved in polemical contexts.

Visser’s study falls into three main parts. The first three chapters focus on two editions of Augustine’s Opera Omnia, namely the second edition (Basel, 1528–29) published under the editorial guidance of Erasmus, and the post-Tridentine edition published in Antwerp in 1576–77. The latter was prepared at Leuven by theologians who were also charged with censoring the previous edition, in which Erasmus had made his views abundantly clear, especially about the authenticity of individual texts seemingly with no concern that he might cause offence. In this section Visser builds solidly on his excellent article ‘How Catholic was Augustine? Confessional Patristic and the Survival of Erasmus in the Counter-Reformation’ published in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 2010. He shows that, despite their claims to present a Roman Catholic alternative to Erasmus’s view of Augustine and to provide an authoritative Catholic alternative edition as supporting evidence, the Leuven theologians incorporated much material from Erasmus’s assertive head-notes. This is, perhaps, surprising, but not only was Erasmus never short of a sharply turned phrase; in this case he was also, most often, obviously right. Visser’s main point here is that in the post-Tridentine Roman church it was not so much Erasmus’s views on Augustinian writings that caused problems, as the status of arch-enemy, which the Church itself had constructed for him.

The second part of the book consists of two chapters on tools for reading Augustine. Visser begins with the guidance provided by the two grand sixteenth-century bibliographies, Gesner’s Bibliotheca universalis and the Jesuit Possevino’s Bibliothecaselecta, whose opposing intellectual aims of universality and prescription have been so stimulatingly presented by Luigi Balsamo. In this well-structured chapter Visser also presents an analysis of the filtering and structuring function of finding aids, especially indexes and anthologies, moving pleasingly between detailed observations and conclusions concerning doctrinal intent.

Chapter 6 is perhaps of greatest interest to readers of The Library, exploring the encounters of individual sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century readers with Augustinian texts, a counterbalance to a view of editions as inherently controlling of readers’ interaction with the text. Visser relies on the evidence edited by Elizabeth Leedham-Green and R. J. Fehrenbach in Private Libraries in Renaissance England (1992–2009) and the unedited evidence based on the investigations of libraries in religious institutions in Italy by the Congregation on the Index of Forbidden Books (see The Library, vii, 13 (2012), 487). It would have been interesting if Visser had provided the reader with information on how he has analysed this massive amount of material. The results of his analysis of both bodies of evidence is presented rather briefly, and more can undoubtedly be understood about the topics by asking questions about what it means if something is present or absent from these lists. The Congregation compiled lists to control the access to books; not all institutional owners might for instance have judged that this was the moment when providing complete transparency was the wisest path to follow. It might also be interesting to consider the interaction between private ownership of Augustine and access to shared collections in colleges. This might also...