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  • Brief Notices
  • Wolfgang P. Mueller, F. Thomas Luongo, Kenneth G. Appold, and Francis J. Weber

Eccher, Luciana (Ed.). Documentazione papale in archivi trentini tra XII e XIII secolo. [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, Fonti, 9.] (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 2010. Pp. 212. €17,50 paperback. ISBN 978-8-815-13930-6.)

The relatively slender volume presents in chronological order all papal documents known to have survived in archives of the late-medieval diocese of Trent and for the period from the oldest preserved (privilege) of 1177 to 1296. Their total amounts to seventy-four items of which sixty-seven appear fully transcribed among the “Documenti” (pp. 65–164); the remaining seven figure only in brief Italian regests. The editor justifies their exclusion by stating that “of several documents . . . a critical edition has been made recently, which renders a new one less than useful” (p. 61). An edition in accordance with current scholarly standards is indeed what Luciana Eccher has set out to accomplish, and the exhaustive presentation of each text as well as the generous inclusion of five “Apparati,” or analytical indices (pp. 165–202), certainly support her claims to philological conscientiousness and accessibility.

Eccher’s introduction (pp. 10–61) highlights in the opening bibliographical section (pp. 10–25; complemented by the bibliography, pp. 203–12) that a mere two of her documents underwent registration at the papal curia. In addition, she states that forty-one of her seventy-four texts survive in the original, others in late-medieval copies. To be sure, the papal documentation in the Tridentine archives promised by the title does not always refer to sources available in the archives today. Eccher’s seventy-four testimonies feature a considerable number (more than twenty) that are no longer extant except in the transcriptions of eighteenth-century antiquarians.

For general historians, Eccher’s introductory remarks on the original recipients of her documentation (pp. 27–53) are particularly intriguing. It turns out that more than forty of the surviving papal letters for Trent from 1177 to 1296 were directed toward a single addressee, the “poor women” of San Michele in Trento (cf. pp. 31–42). The extraordinary density of this material on the earliest stages of the women’s religious movement and its progressive institutionalization in the forms of, first, the order of St. Damian and, later, the Poor Clares, will be of special interest to students whose research falls outside the scope of local Tridentine affairs.

Wolfgang P. Mueller
(Fordham University) [End Page 186]

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, and Bruce L. Venarde (Eds. and trans.). Two Women of the Great Schism: The Revelations of Constance de Rabastans, by Raymond de Sabanac, and Life of the Blessed Ursulina of Parma, by Simone Zanacchi. [The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 3.] (Toronto: ITER, Inc., and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto. 2010. Pp. xi, 131. $13.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-772-72057-3.)

This volume is a fascinating glimpse into the lives of two “ordinary” women who, against social norms, were able, through visionary authority, to intervene in the politics of the day. In addition to providing access to female experience, these texts give a vivid sense of the deep and pervasive influence of the Great Schism on the mental world of contemporary Christians— the topic of Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski’s Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park, PA, 2006).

The Revelations of Constance de Rabestans is an account by her confessor of the spiritual insights of a young woman from Toulouse who in the 1380s began receiving visions that led her to denounce the Avignon papacy. Although she became for some a type of oracle, for others she was a political nuisance; indeed, authorities in Toulouse had her jailed. The Life of the Blessed Ursulina of Parma was written in 1472 at the behest of the abbess of the convent that possessed Ursulina’s body. The Life describes in conventionally hagiographic terms the dramatically unconventional life of Ursulina, a diminutive visionary born in 1375, who was moved by divine command to intervene in the Schism by traveling to Avignon and Rome...

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