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  • Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620
  • Åke Bergvall
Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620. By Arnoud S. Q. Visser. [Oxford Studies in Historical Theology.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xiv, 240. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-199-76593-5.)

In a brief 139 pages (with an additional 100 pages of textual apparatus) that belie their extensive and innovative scholarship, Arnoud Visser sets out to investigate the production, circulation, and consumption of St. Augustine’s works from 1500 to 1620 in a study aimed “to delineate how the material infrastructure of reading in Reformation Europe enabled readers of various backgrounds to appropriate Augustine in radically different ways”(p. 7). In the section on production Visser examines the three sixteenth-century editions of Augustine’s opera omnia: the Amerbach (1505–06), the Froben (1528–29, edited by Desiderius Erasmus), and the Plantin (1576–77, edited by theologians from the Catholic University of Leuven). In the section on circulation the focus is on how confessional considerations prompted the way Augustine was presented in bibliographies, indexes, and the patristic anthologies that “came to play a dominant role” in the dissemination of his texts (p. 91). The section on consumption, finally, focuses on reading practices, including the provenance of Augustine’s œuvre (including spurious works) in Protestant England and Catholic Italy, individual case studies of the different responses of three influential theologians within English Protestantism (Thomas Cranmer, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and William Laud), and a discussion of the public debates centering on Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings in Catholic Leuven and Protestant Leiden. [End Page 111]

This is an invaluable study of how the Church Father was read in Reformation Europe, but it also usefully explores the complex interrelationship among the scholarly, confessional, and mercantile interests by which an authority like Augustine is mediated through both printed and oral media. Besides mapping the terrain expertly, Visser, supported by solid textual evidence, is able to make a number of inferences, some of which go against received scholarly opinion. He can demonstrate, for example, how the “dynamic interaction” (p. 8) between humanism and Reformation could benefit both parties, but also how the humanists (their protestations to the contrary), not unlike the scholastics they derided, facilitated “a selective, fragmented, and goal-oriented reading practice” (p. 9). On the issue of the confessionalization of Augustine, Visser shows that Amerbach’s conservative edition probably did as much for the growth of Protestantism as the one by Erasmus, whereas the Leuven edition, despite its conception as a post-Tridentine Catholic alternative to the Froben edition, in fact silently incorporated much of Erasmus’s scholarship and was, except for certain commentary to Augustine’s anti-Donatist and anti-Pelagian works, confessionally neutral. It is rather in the circulation of Augustine’s œuvre that an overt confessional presence can be felt—that is, in the construction of bibliographies and indexes, and in particular in the selection and presentation of Augustine’s works in the many compendia produced. Another important circumstance that one gleans from Visser’s study is how the confessional lines in these contentious debates (often over Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works) were not necessarily drawn between Catholic and Protestant, but as often within each religious community. Thus two Anglican archbishops like Cranmer and Laud can draw diametrically opposed conclusions about the use of Augustine, as did the Baianists and their opponents in Catholic Leuven (a fight soon exported to France in the form of acrimonious disputes between Jansenists and Jesuits), as well as the Calvinists and Arminians in Protestant Leiden.

Åke Bergvall
Karlstad University, Sweden
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