Faith and Fantasy in the Renaissance: Texts, Images, and Religious Practices ed. by Olga Zorzi Pugliese and Ethan Matt Kavaler (review)

The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies began in 1960 as a special rare books collection, focused on Erasmus and humanism, within the framework of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. It has become, however, a vibrant centre for scholarship in the humanities, hosting symposia on interdisciplinary themes and sponsoring numerous publications that are sought out by researchers and academic teachers alike. The nineteen essays collected in Faith and Fantasy in the Renaissance represent highlights from the conference organized by the CRRS in 2007 and feature specialized considerations of religion in the early modern world. The topics range widely to include the learned Christian ideas of Dante, Cusanus, and Erasmus; some popular religious beliefs of the labouring poor in northeastern Italy as documented in Inquisition trials; an interpretation of the naturalistic language used by Renaissance painters to depict a higher, spiritual reality; a reading of Albrecht Dürer’s own religious beliefs about the artist as divinely inspired creator through his famous Self-Portrait; and an essay on how the range of distinctive devotional practices in Rembrandt’s day was reflected in some of his religious subjects, notably paintings of Moses and the Tablets of the Law.

In their well-crafted introduction, Olga Pugliese and Matt Kavaler situate these case studies within the overarching theme of the impact of religion on society and culture in the early modern era, a period marked most emphatically by the division of the Western Christian church following the Protestant Reformation, but also a time during which proponents of the ‘catholic’ faith grappled with the experience of encountering other systems of belief, as the perimeters of the known world were expanding greatly and major cities became increasingly cosmopolitan. Professors Pugliese and Kavaler emphasize two principal inquiries that guide the essays: how religion in a wide variety of manifestations influenced both social practices and cultural forms, especially literature and art; and the way imaginative and creative individuals interpreted and reshaped religious beliefs as revealed by cultural artifacts.

Although many students of this era may conceive of religion as a dogmatic and legally formulated code of belief and practice, which was perpetuated through the church liturgy and performed punitively in the persecution of heretics, many of the essays instead convey how malleable systems of Christian belief could be under the impact of human imagination, understanding, and control. For instance, Pina Palma explores the way Dante uses poetic language in the Purgatorio to probe the relationship between the human and the divine, in the process subtly but significantly changing the Aristotelian view he had inherited concerning the way in which the divine soul first enters into human flesh during the development of the embryo. In an essay that also charts the transformation of religious beliefs by intelligent and influential individuals, Paola Modesti investigates the Christian legend of the founding of the city of Venice, revealing how the Venetian councillors during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries rewrote the story of St. Magnus for political reasons. Through the official apparatus of city chronicles and prominent church altarpieces (including Cima’s Incredulity of St. Thomas in the presence of Bishop Magnus, dated c. 1503), the senate promulgated a story of St. Magnus that provided the city with a powerful Christian mythology. Although formerly identified as the Bishop of Heraclea, Magnus was reborn as Venice’s first bishop, and the evocative legend of the foundation of a Christian city after celestial visions had led a bishop to build the first civic churches was recomposed to document the foundation of the lagoon city by St. Magnus.

These essays evidently offer insights and specialized research for scholars of religion, art, literature, and culture in the early modern period. However, when considered as a whole, the collection also serves to nuance and increase our understanding of the definition of religion and the scope of its impact...