Retrieving a Living Tradition: Angelina of Montegiove: Franciscan, Tertiary, Beguine by Roberta Agnes McKelvie, O.S.F. (review)

book reviews457 largely outmoded, model of analysis. True, Protestant reform and issues of war and peace attempted to base themselves on biblical exegesis, but Lowe generally ignores closely related, medieval evangelical peacemaking, once again revealing a dependence on such three-period models as that crafted by Roland Bainton (early church pacifism, medieval Catholic just-war, and Protestant evangelical pacifism/nonresistance). Adherents of Gospel peacemaking and nonviolence certainly did exist in the Middle Ages and early modern period—and many acted on their beliefs and had varying degrees of impact. But their words and deeds, it seems, must still be liberated from historical schémas that implicitly or explicitly view the just war as the only normative formulation of Christian peacemaking during the period. Ronald G. Musto Itálica Press New York Retrieving a Living Tradition: Angelina of Montegiove: Franciscan, Tertiary, Beguine. By Roberta Agnes McKelvie, O.S.F. (St. Bonaventure, New York: The Franciscan Institute. 1997. Pp. xi, 211. $13.00 paperback.) The influence of Angelina of Montegiove (ca. 1357-1435) can be traced through the pages of this study from her important center at Foligno in Italy, through Poland to the United States today. Sister Roberta McKelvie has performed a great service to those interested in medieval women's history, and specifically in the history of the Franciscan Third Order Regular women's communities , in making available in English rich sources of documentation from Latin, Italian, and Polish sources. A revised version of Sister Roberta's doctoral dissertation at Fordham University, the text addresses sometimes complex questions of hagiography and historiography with the goal of a feminist reconstruction of Angelina's story. Inspiring several communities of Italian bizzocche, women penitents or Béguines ,Angelina was chosen by these women as "Minister General" of a federation , the first example of what would later be congregations of Franciscan women following the Rule of the Third Order of St. Francis. The life ofAngelina and her sisters combined self-support through their own work with a marked contemplative spirit, in communities of women who celebrated their own General Chapters, elected their own Minister General, and moved from one federated community to another, living a "lay-religious" life without monastic enclosure. Her movement, based at the monastery of Sant'Anna in Foligno, was closely associated with the Observant Friars Minor (called zoccolanti) and their leader, Paoluccio de'Trinci of Foligno,portrayed along with Angelina in engravings (figs. 3, 4 on p. 81) accompanying the text (the proper term for the wooden clogs pictured is zoccoli). Sister Roberta clearly demonstrates the harm done by the "First Order" (the Friars Minor) to this centralized, autonomous, mobile women's federation. 458book reviews Through decrees of its own General Chapters and through papal intervention, the Friars Minor managed to have the office of "Minister General" and the right to a General Chapter revoked, in an attempt to subject the women of the "Third Order" to the men of the "First Order." Sister Roberta's story offers a new chapter of this history in her examination of archival materials from Polish communities, especially in Cracow, which show the influence of Angelina's form of communal life for tertiary women, as it was propagated by John Capistran in his preaching missions in eastern Europe between 1451 and 1456. From these Polish foundations of the fifteenth century came the precursors of the Bernardine Franciscan Sisters in the United States today. William J. Short, O.F.M. Franciscan School ofTheology Berkeley, California Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380-1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing. By Lynn F. Jacobs. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 352. $80.00.) If art historians had been intent on documenting the visual environment of Netherlandish churchgoers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a study like this would have been undertaken many years ago. As it happens, however, the "new art" of detailed, illusionistic painting at the hands of artists like Campin, Van Eyck, and Van derWeyden captivated the interest of scholars to such an extent that even today students in the field find it difficult to locate useful documentation on sculpture of this period; this in spite of the fact that it was likely the dominant...