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  • Sacred History. Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World ed. by Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan
  • Irena Backus
Sacred History. Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World. Edited by Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. xxiv, 339. $125.00. ISBN 978-0-19-959479-5.)

This volume grew out of two colloquia held respectively at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI) in 2008 and at the University of Notre Dame's London Centre in 2010. Some participants at the second colloquium (such as J. L. Quantin, Alexandra Walsham, and Matthias Pohlig) are not represented in the present volume any more than are Margaret Meserve, Alison Frazier, and Joanna Weinberg who are also acknowledged in the preface (p. xiii). The volume contains thirteen papers divided into three sections—Church History in the Renaissance and Reformation, National History and Sacred History, and Uses of Sacred History in the Early Modern Catholic World. The contributors include established scholars such as Anthony Grafton and Euan Cameron as well as those of the younger generation such as Giuseppe Guazzelli and Adam G. Beaver. Although on the whole the collection is interesting and well balanced, none of the papers deal with the specific theme of sacred history, devoting attention instead to ecclesiastical history (Baronius and the so-called Centuries of Magdeburg figure particularly prominently) and its interaction with national history on the one hand and contemporary religious politics on the other. In fact, Sulpicius Severus, the "inventor" of historia sacra is only mentioned once in passing (p. 77), whereas the fact that Flacius Illyricus, the initiator of the Centuries, rediscovered and published him in 1556 is not covered. No mention either is made of van Andel's study The Christian Concept of History in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (Amsterdam, 1976).

In fact, historia sacra was viewed by Sulpicius Severus and others in his wake as a condensation and continuation of the biblical account of history in a cultivated Latin style, intended to appeal to readers of Roman historical authors such as Sallust or Tacitus and avoiding allegorical interpretation of sacred events. As Sulpicius says in his book I, he managed to condense into two short parts events that otherwise required several volumes. Sacred history in this strict sense of the term assumed a very marginal role in the Renaissance as confessional "ecclesiastical histories" began to oust sacred history as such. Now, as several contributions note, "ecclesiastical history" goes back to the model set up by Eusebius of Caesarea, which consists of the history of the Christian church from the time of the apostles onward. "Ecclesiastical history" lends itself much more easily to confessional treatment [End Page 557] than "sacred history." Unsurprisingly, therefore, all the contributions treat ecclesiastical history and not sacred history, be it as such or in conjunction with national history. The titles of the articles as well as their contents are revealing of the volume's approach. These range from "Church History in Early Modern Europe" (Grafton) and "Primitivism, Patristics and Polemic in Protestant Visions of Early Christianity"(Cameron) to "Elizabethan Histories of English Christian Origins" (Rosamund Oates) and "The Lives of the Saints in the French Renaissance" (Jean-Marie Le Gall). Most articles, as the preface notes, deal in fact with the Roman Catholic approach to ecclesiastical history in the confessional period.

Once it is accepted that the work as a whole is based on a misconception, the volume contains much interesting—although not altogether new— material. This reviewer found the section on the conjunction of ecclesiastical and national history particularly coherent and rewarding. The authors in this section go to some lengths to show convincingly, for example, the patriotic character of German history-writing serving as support to ecclesiastical history (David J. Collins). This included works such as Schedel's Chronicle that should have been situated with precision as belonging to the historia sacra genre.

Irena Backus
University of Geneva
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