On the Road to Italian Church History

Paul F. Grendler

I am an historian of the Italian Renaissance rather than a lifetime church historian. But because it is not possible to study Renaissance Italy without encountering church institutions in various circumstances, the majority of my books deal with the church in Italy in greater or lesser degree. That is the framework for this journey in church history.

The journey began on May 24, 1936, in Armstrong, Iowa, population 700, near the Minnesota border. My grandparents on my father’s side came from Silesia, then part of Germany, now part of Poland, while my grandparents on my mother’s side came from Luxembourg. All four emigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1900 and settled in small towns or farms in northern Iowa. A remakable feature of my parents’ lives was that both taught one-room rural schools, grades one through eight, in northern Iowa. My father taught from 1924 to 1942, and my mother from 1926 to 1935. Neither had the opportunity to obtain a university degree. But one could qualify as a teacher in a rural school with a few weeks of instruction. My father attended a teacher-training program one summer, probably in Spencer, Iowa. My mother learned how to teach at a summer program at Iowa State Teacher’s College at Cedar Falls, much later renamed The University of Northern Iowa. That was it. They were obviously talented teachers. The story is that they met at a teachers’ conference. They married in the summer of 1935 during the Great Depression and I grew up in modest circumstances.

My father stopped teaching in 1942 because it did not pay enough to support a growing family of two sons and a third on the way. He became a school custodian, which meant that he was in charge of heating and cleaning a school building. He served as the school custodian in several small towns. My mother helped my father by sweeping classrooms after school and I did the same in my first two years of high school. In those small towns one building, usually three stories and a large basement, housed all twelve grades with maybe a gymnasium attached. The heat came from a large coal-burning furnace for which the school custodian needed a license to operate. When I was ten our family lived in two large rooms in the Bradgate, Iowa, Consolidated School for the academic year 1946–1947, because of the shortage of housing right after World War II.

I was a voracious reader as a child. My father took me and my brothers fishing now and then and I brought along a book for when the fish were not biting. After a while I decided that the book was more interesting than the fish and stayed home. Every tiny town in which I lived had a public library which I haunted. Bradgate, population about 250, was such a town. Its public library consisted of some space in the fire house. One could sit on the running board of the fire engine and look at a book. It was open Wednesday and Saturday nights. The bookmobile brought a fresh load of books every three months from the Humboldt County Library located in Humboldt, Iowa. When I was almost out of books to read toward the end of periods between visits of the bookmobile, I was forced to look at the tiny permanent collection, which included a set of Shakespeare’s complete works. I am sorry to say that I did not have enough curiosity to try Shakespeare.

My interest in history began as a child during World War II. My parents subscribed to a daily newspaper, The Des Moines Register, and my father listened to radio news commentators such as H. V. Kaltenborn (1878–1965). So I followed the progress of the war and first learned about far away countries. My parents kept track of domestic politics. For example, in the summer of 1948 when I was helping my father scrub floors and wash walls in the school building in Bradgate...