Kardinal Jean Jouffroy († 1473): Leben und Werk by Claudia Märtl (review)

BOOK REVIEWS95 how he set out to achieve these and thus how he differed from earUer writers and his own contemporaries. SpecificaUy Cannara was writing after the spUt had occurred at the CouncU of Basel and that CouncU had charged Eugenius IV with heresy.As other papalists were doing, Cannara strove to estabUsh the immunity of the pope against that charge.What is new is his response to and his way of dealing with the classical texts which said that the pope could not be judged by anyone unless he deviated from the faith. EarUer writers squirmed around these texts with a variety ofcommentary, e.g., that the pope who became a heretic was ipsofacto setfdeposed and so no longer pope, or that one had to work through a long and detaUed analysis of what the charge of heresy meant (formal vs. material heresy). Cannara wUl have none ofthis; he simply asserts a mutual exclusivity in the two parts of the classical text.The pope could not be judged by anyone because he was above the Church, subject only to God,Who bestowed on him a special grace that precluded him from ever being deviant in faith. By a wave of his magical wand of argumentation Cannara asserted that it was impossible for a pope to be devius a fide. Thus the pope had absolute immunity and stood above and apart from the Church which depended totaUy on him.What about the long, voluminous earlier tradition that others had struggled with? History that was inconvenient could simply be ignored, denied, or misinterpreted out of existence.Whatever did not fit, was not.This was a nice neat Line of argumentation . Priigl has done a service presenting this tract and providing an edition of the text which is worthy of reflection and critical analysis. Thomas E. Morsissey State University ofNew York College at Fredonia KardinalJean Jouffroy (f 1473):Leben undWerk. By Claudia Märtl. [Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters, Band 18.] (Sigmaringen : JanThorbeckeVerlag. 1996. Pp. 397. DM 108.) Jean Jouffroy's career reflects the competing aspirations that marked the ecclesiastical vocation in the fifteenth century. Born into a Burgundian mercantUe famUy, he joined the Benedictine Order, studied canon law at the University of Pavia (where he also encountered the famed ItaUan humanist Lorenzo VaUa), then during the CouncU of Ferrara-Florence (1438-39) entered thefamilia of Francesco Condulmer, the influential nephew of Pope Eugenius IV From this point on,his advance in the ranks ofthe Church proceeded rapidly, culminating in his gaining the red hat in 1461 . Given neither to personal austerity nor to the cloistered life of prayer, he lived a highly pubUc career, emerging as a skillful papal diplomat and wealthy church administrator, becoming Bishop of Arras (1453) and subsequently of Albi (1462), and then Abbot of Saint-Denis (1464). In many ways an ambitious and worldly careerist (even labeled as avaricious by Pope Pius II), whose legal 96BOOK REVIEWS training faciUtated both his diplomatic activities and his abUities to function as a curial insider, he nonetheless was a highly cultured prelate who became an important practitioner of the new humanist oratory at the papal court and an influential patron ofhumanistic learning. He acquired an extensive classical and patristic library, including manuscripts of recent humanist translations of Chrysostom and other Church Fathers, and he commissioned Francesco Griffolini , the humanist from Arezzo, to provide Latin translations of Chrysostom's Homilies on 1 Corinthians and Homilies on John. Jouffroy's own writings (the author usefuUy provides in an appendix a complete chronological Usting of titles, including manuscript data and relevant scholarly studies) include an oration in praise of St. John the EvangeUst, deUvered before the papal court on that saint's feast day (December 27) in 1438; the funeral oration for Pope NicholasV (1455); and a dialogue, De dignitate cardinalatus (1467/68), which in response to the accusations of an anonymousfraticelli sympathizer justifies the Uturgical splendor ofthe papal court (including Pope Paul IFs controversial use of the triple tiara at papal Masses) as imparting rightful dignity and authority to the papal see. Yet Jouffroy's life was less Rome-centered than that of many other Renaissance cardinals. Early in...