Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching Rhetoric, Spirituality and Reform (review)

Reviews 227 actual noble ladies would have travelled with their crowns, yet without any attendants to be visibly slaughtered in their defence. The picture, pretty clearly an allegorical illustration, needs to be interpreted generically before it can be read as any kind of representation of actuality, as do a number of the other illustrations. Despite these limitations, the book is an interesting brief survey, suggesting at the least many topics for further investigation, and if it had been reissued with an index and at least a minimum of bibliographical apparatus, this translation (executed with only a few trivial blemishes) would be of great utility. Michael J. Wright Department of English The University of Auckland O'Malley, John W., Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching Rhetoric, Spirituality and Reform, (Collected Studies Series 404), Aldershot, Variorum, 1993; cloth; pp. 283; R.R.P. £42.50. These thirteen articles on the relationship between religion and culture in Renaissance Europe were originally published between 1981 and 1991. They here appear more or less in chronological order and fall into two groups—the first on rhetoric, grammar and preaching and the second on the Jesuit order. The first article (1981), in John O'Malley's clear and judicious style, analyses Paris de Grasses' Supplementum to demonstrate that the feast of St Thomas Aquinas in R o m e was neither medieval nor, as commonly thought, Tridentine in origin, but was the creation of Nicholas V and his Dominican advisers during the 1450s. Thomist doctrine with its papalist implications dominated Renaissance Rome, so that when Leo X sent Cajetan to meet Luther in 1518, unfortunately it was an envoy steeped in Aquinas who . encountered Luther's Augustinian theological system and vocabulary. The early articles deal with the form, content and influence of rhetoric, grammar and preaching, principally Egidio da Viterbo, the Franciscans, Luther, Erasmus and Borromeo. The article on Egidio da Viterbo and Renaissance R o m e (1983) contains a schematic exposition of a spectrum towards one end of which is rhetoric: both primary rhetoric, namely, the spoken word within the vita activa, and secondary rhetoric, the written word of rhetorical techniques. Towards the other end of the spectrum, secondary rhetoric merges into grammar, the study of style and philological, 228 Reviews philosophical and theological interpretations within the vita contemplativa. It is argued that Erasmus, in c o m m o n with Petrarch and Valla, began with grammar but moved along the spectrum towards secondary rhetoric—as it were from wisdom to techniques—rather than the other way around. W e may speculate whether effective orators in the vita activa had also journeyed, however briefly, along that spectrum. About 1450 the thematic scholastic sermons on abstract doctrines gave way under humanist influence to the style of genus demonstrativum, which focused on the beneficia of God's action in order to persuade rather than to teach. H e briefly mentions Guarino da Verona, but in the opinion of this reviewer, Guarino's immense practical influence in Padua and later in Ferrara, deserves greater attention. The Franciscans also abandoned later medieval preaching styles in favour of more classical oratory, but they concentrated upon exhortation, preaching to the laity the ninth chapter of the Franciscan rule, on 'vices and virtues, punishment and reward', and being firmly prescriptive about morals. In his treatise Ecclesiastes, of 1535, Erasmus surveyed the history of biblical, patristic, scholastic, mendicant, penitential and humanist sacred rhetoric, and propounded a genus suasorium (introducing the word contio for sermon). His ideas heavily influenced Catholic preaching especially in southern Europe. Protestant preaching, led by Melanchthon, looked more to the genus didascalicum (with its clear prescriptive doctrinal content and directions for decision and action), but there was much overlapping of the two styles. During the 1570s Charles Borromeo, saint and Archbishop of Milan, steered away from Erasmus, whose Ecclesiastes was placed on the Index in 1559, and used biblical and patristic material not so much for Erasmian persuasion as for moralistic and behaviouristic preaching. Assisted by Franciscan friends, Borromeo thus continued the mendicant penitential influence, and built up an active 'school' of preaching which buttressed the new Tridentine, pastorally disciplined age for clergy and laity. The later...