The Anointment of Dionisio: Prophecy and Politics in Renaissance Italy (review)

In February of 1563, a certain Dionisio Gallo, rector of the Collège de Lisieux in Paris, experienced what he later described as an anointment by the Virgin Mary, an anointment that occurred on the outside of his body and on the inside, from "the top of my head to the tip of my toes" (p. 8). He seems to have frequented the circle of the King, Charles IX, perhaps having even served as one of his tutors. Yet Dionisio, after his anointment, became a fervent believer in reform, and he came to consider that the French monarchical apparatus, including Catherine de' Medici, was too lukewarm to carry out a desired reunification of a fractured Christendom. His public voicing of these opinions did not play well in Paris, and he was sent back to his home city of Gisors. Thus began a series of peregrinations which took him to Savoyard Turin, the Rome of Pius V, the Florence of Cosimo I, Este Ferrara, and, finally, to la Serenissima, where he wound up imprisoned and tried by the Venetian inquisition; there, on August 12, 1567, he was sentenced as "guilty of public assemblies, contrary to the command of the Holy Office" (p. 176). His crimes, however, were attributed to a "humoral imbalance," and so he was let off relatively lightly, banished from Venice and its possessions. Marion Leathers Kuntz has expertly reconstructed this fascinating and hitherto unstudied story with patient archival research, historiographical breadth, and fine comparative readings of Dionisio's surviving works. Various themes come to the fore.

The first is Dionisio's style of prophecy, which Kuntz fleshes out from a number of different perspectives. Dionisio seems to have recapitulated a number of different available prophetic tropes: from the Joachite tradition, he propounded an apocalyptic perspective; from the Old Testament tradition, he appeared, not as a hair-shirted extremist, but as a learned, serious, and leader-like person who was able to gain access to important political figures wherever he went. Unlike his contemporary Nostradamus, Dionisio was a prophet of the present, not of the future. This present-oriented tendency meant that he was intensely aware of the use of symbols and of the importance of associating himself with locally-important political ideas. In Venice, for example, he preached from within the cortile of the Palazzo Ducale, thus associating himself symbolically with a Venetian propensity toward an idealistically understood "justice." In Rome, he walked through the streets bearing a seven-foot cross, before presenting Pius V with a letter in St. Peter's basilica, a letter which Pius reportedly kept on his nightstand for a day or two thereafter. In Turin, he supported the idea held by Emanuele Filiberto of the importance of an Italian league to defeat heresy—a league that would be led by Emanuele. In Florence, Dionisio played on Cosimo's competitiveness with Emanuele to continue to urge the formation of a (secularly led) Italian league, before Dionisio had to leave after angering the papal nuncio in Florence.

In his various works and in the testimony from the inquisitorial trial, Dionisio propounded a consistent set of reform ideas. These ideas centered on the reform of the clergy, the extirpation of heresy, charity and consolation toward the less fortunate (including the idea that one-third of the Church's wealth should be given back to the poor), and the leading of Jews and Turks toward Christ. Through it all, he maintained that the clergy and the Roman Curia must be reformed first; this reform would then spread, by its own power and shining example, outward to the rest of society and naturally bring heretics and "infidels" into the fold. Significantly, he stressed that if the Church could not carry out this reform itself (and he clearly believed it could not), then secular rulers were obligated to take the lead and compel the Church to reform. According to Kuntz, this lack of satisfaction...