El Renacimiento y la otra España. Visión Cultural Socioespiritual by José C. Nieto (review)

762BOOK REVIEWS This fine book by Matthias Wirz has as its stated aim not only to present the history of the insurrection which lasted almost the whole of 1421 and to identify the main players in the revolt but also to uncover its causes, surely multiple, and its significance. The primary source for Wirz's investigation is the procès verbale of the inquest launched at Payerne soon after the troubles by commissioners of the duke of Savoy,Amadeus VIII. One-hundred forty-eight witnesses were questioned by the three commissioners within a few weeks of the final acts of insurrection; while their responses may vary according to the intelligence or degrees of participation in the revolt, the strength of their feelings is evident throughout the testimony. Unfortunately, none of the priory's monks was called as witness, and so we have only one side of the story. The first half of the book divides itself into three sections. The first investigates the relations between the city and the priory and prior; the second describes the organization of the inquest made by the duke's commissioners, providing both a list ofwitnesses called and the questions they were asked. The third section discusses the revolt itself,the secret meetings of the discontented, the riots on the feast of the Epiphany and on Mardi Gras, and the violence throughout the rest of year until November. The second half of the work presents a very competent edition of the inquest plus three letters from Duke Amadeus, an account of a hearing held by the duke with the two parties present , and the questioning of the witnesses. It is provided with an adequate bibliography and an index of names of persons and places. While the book could have been enriched by a comparison ofthe Payerne revolt with other insurrections against monasteries (Fleury or Vézelay for instance ), it is a welcome addition to the literature of popular revolts in the Middle Ages as well as to that of the delicate (or violent) interplay between monk, monastery, and society. Thomas Sullivan, O.S.B. Conception Abbey Early Modern European El Renacimiento y la otra España. Visión Cultural Socioespiritual. ByJosé C. Nieto. [Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, No. CCCXV] (Geneva: Librairie Droz, S.A. 1997. Pp. 855.) In the last few decades, and continuing into the most recent years, the ambiguous and contested religious beliefs of such sixteenth-century figures as Contarini,Pole, Morone, and Carranza have been newly investigated by Spanish, Italian, British, and American scholars. From such research it has at least become clear how genuinely perplexing and dangerously uncertain were the precise bounds of Catholic orthodoxy in that century until the early stages of the Council of Trent in the mid-1 540's. In the consequently difficult task of identi- BOOK REVIEWS763 fying the beliefs held at precise dates by such figures, the example ofJuan de Valdés, who moved from Spain to Italy, has naturally emerged as important, and in understanding him scholars have been able to draw on the monograph, of 1970, by José Nieto. Furthermore, the last few decades have also seen a transformation of scholarly knowledge of the Spanish Inquisition, thanks to excellent , detailed studies by Spanish and other historians. A volume as vast as the one considered here might therefore be expected to prove of great value, as a contribution to the historical debate which continues about the range of religious beliefs in both Spain and Italy in the sixteenth century. Sadly, despite a considerable number of stimulating suggestions and observations in this monumental work, it proves to make little contact with that debate. Indeed, the terms of the debate seem to be virtually ignored, despite some reference in passing to relevant work on Pole and Carranza, though not Morone or Contarini. Nor does there appear to be any recognition of the extensive new research, much of it written in Spanish, on the Spanish Inquisition. Moreover, in all this vast number of pages no archival references would seem to be included as the result of the author's own researches, the few that do feature being apparently cited via the secondary literature. That secondary reading...