Sacred History. Uses of the Past in the Renaissance World ed. by Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (review)

In her preface to this important volume, Katherine Van Liere rightly points out that its subject—the historiography of Christianity in the Renaissance—is an “emerging field” in scholarship (p. vii). The first four chapters in the volume, therefore, aim to give an introduction to this field. Anthony Grafton, in the opening chapter “Church History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation,” issues a warning: “The beginning of wisdom in such a vast field is to recognize how little we actually know about the precise practices of ecclesiastical scholarship and how they mutated from generation to generation, community to community, and subject to subject” (p. 8). He gives a helpful summary of how modern scholars have usually seen the differences between Renaissance humanist historians and church historians. According to this view, Renaissance humanist historians set out to discover an unknown past, whereas church historians looked for support for pre-existing theses. Humanists looked at human actions (as opposed to providence) as the deciding factors in history. They felt, in their present, a historical distance from the past (not a presence of tradition); and they applied new critical methods to historical sources (p. 5). Grafton shows that these distinctions are true only up to a point, because there was much cross-fertilization: Renaissance scholars were far more interested in church history than is usually acknowledged. Examples of this are Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, and Desiderius Erasmus. Grafton then looks at church historians proper and how they took up and expanded Eusebius of Caesarea’s model in their writings.

Euan Cameron gives an introduction to Protestant visions of early Christianity in the Renaissance. Beginning his discussion with the idea that “the reformers were in some senses humanists and in others anti-humanists” (p. 27), Cameron sees a development from “humanist-inspired” to “doctrinal-apocalyptic” Protestant church history in the sixteenth century. The key issue for Protestants was to explain why error came into the Church after apostolic times. Prevailing models of church history did not suit the Protestant view of the “grand-scale theological defection of the medieval Church” (p. 31), and so the historians of the Reformation had to reinvent their discipline. The humanist-inspired histories (such as those by the Swiss Reformers Joachim Vadian and Heinrich Bullinger) emphasized human fallibility and the deterioration of what had been, initially, good intentions in religious life. The doctrinal-apocalyptic variants, on the other hand (such as the Magdeburg Centuries), maintained that wrong teachings and the dilution of the ideas of the Gospel inevitably led to degradation from early on. According to Cameron, for Protestants ecclesiastical history was not “sacred,” since they “rejected the notion that anything in human life could be made ‘sacred’ or imbued with holy properties through the association with religion” (p. 29).

The Madgeburg Centuries (published 1559–74) inspired a substantial Catholic response: Cesare Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607). Baronio’s aim was to demonstrate that the Church, from its beginning, had remained semper eadem (always the same). Giuseppe A. Guazzelli in his chapter notes that because of the “symbiotic relationship between Catholic history and Catholic orthodoxy” (p. 61), it is difficult to establish what Baronio’s personal positions were. Baronio introduced elements of open conjecture and speculation to prove, polemically and perhaps in a personal way, the early origins of church traditions (for example, the tradition that St. Peter founded the see of Antioch). In the last of the introductory chapters, Simon Ditchfield discusses the term historia sacra that “was usually employed to refer specifically to biblical history” (p. 74). For Catholics, the term could also mean the history of the Church after biblical times, together with all its aspects (that is, saints, liturgy, and so forth). Ditchfield demonstrates the richness of the category historia sacra as used for the internal classification of major...