The conversion of Henri IV: politics, power and religious belief in early modern France (review)

172 Reviews willingness to spill Christian blood to increase the temporal power of the papacy; however, the world is probably willing to forgive the patron of Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Christine Shaw states that because of his patronage of the arts, his attention to Italian politics, and his neglect of spiritual matters, Julius II was the epitome of a Renaissance Pope. Shaw's biography Is sympathetic toward Julius II without being an apology for him. It is competent and readable, but at times the detail is overwhelming. It is not a book for the novice. She plunges into the intricacies of papal politics and diplomacy and does not surface until midway through the book with two excellent chapters on the papal court and Julius's patronage of the arts. After this breather, she plunges on anew until his death, almost ending in mid-sentence. A bare two pages of assessment serve as a conclusion. Her greatest contribution is her archival work that reveals many aspects of Giuliano della Rovere's career as a cardinal. This part of the biography comprises 120 pages of the text while the pontificate receives less than 200 pages. The dust jacket states that Shaw's biography of Julius is thefirst'in any language to be based on an extensive use of archival sources'. This is misleading, for volume VI of Ludwig Pastor's 40volume History of the Popes devotes 400 pages to the pontificate of Julius II, including 150 on his patronage of the arts. Shaw's biography is a valuable contribution, but it is not yet time to discard a treasured set of Pastor. A. Lynn Martin Department of History The University of Adelaide Wolfe, Michael, The conversion of Henri TV: politics, power and religious belief in early modern France, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1993; pp.x, 253; R.R.P. US$39.95. It will be a shock to some readers of this intricate study to discover that Henri himself did not make the famous quip that 'Paris is worth a Mass'. The fact that such cynicism and irreverence could be attributed to him by his enemies of the Catholic League does, however, highlight the essential difficulty of the king's conversion. If it were to serve its purpose of national reconciliation, it would have to be accepted as genuine. But how to Reviews 173 convince anyone that the king was sincere when the political expediency of the move was so obvious? And who could trust a man who had converted to Catholicism in the aftermath of the St Bartholomew massacres in 1572 and recanted four years later? There are two reasons why this study of Henri's return to the Church on 25 July 1593 makes a more useful contribution to the historiography of French politics and religion than most histoire evinementielle. Fhst Wolfe links his detailed analysis of every sacred and secular aspect of the conversion ceremony to the mentalitis of Henri's subjects. This is not a book about the king's spiritual odyssey. It is a study of the political and religious expectations of the French nobUity and clergy. The dilemmas of the Huguenots are not ignored but Wolfe concentrates above all on the straggle between the loyalist Catholics prepared to use time and persuasion to lead Henri of Navarre to then side, and the Leaguer Catholics resisting him with all then might. Wolfe's study uses more than 200 pamphlets circulating between 1560 and 1600 to examine the tortured debate on how to reconcile the demands of being a bonfrancois with the imperatives of a bon catholique. In so doing it raises the problem of the nature and role of 'public opinion'. In the late sixteenth century this was inevitably an 61ite concept but the book could still do more than make infrequent and frustratingly sibylline references to the significance of economic collapse, the war weariness of the peasantry, and the 'garbled murmurings of the lower classes' (p. 4). Secondly, the events and attitudes of 1593 are firmly set in the longue durie, particularly that of the ideas and practices of political resistance and authority. Henri's private rather than public act of contrition at St Denis...