Reform, Ecclesiology, and the Christian Life in the Late Middle Ages (review)

Since the publication of his book Protector of the Faith. Cardinal Johannes de Turrecremata and the Defense of the Institutional Church (Washington, DC, 1981), Thomas Izbicki has been a familiar and consistent voice in scholarship on legal thought and church history in the later Middle Ages. An officer and active member of the American Cusanus Society for many years, Izbicki made late-medieval ecclesiology accessible to a wider audience of students and scholars by his reliable and well-documented translations of works of Cusanus, Torquemada, and other authors from the Dominican order. Numerous studies ensuing from these translations provided valuable context and promoted better understanding of the facts, intentions, and motives of the ideological struggles in the later Middle Ages. The present volume gathers fourteen studies published between 1998 and 2006, and one original contribution, among them some pearls of Izbicki's sedulous work during the past ten years. As in any volume from the Ashgate Variorum Collected Studies series, the articles are reproduced anastatically, keeping the original typesetting and page numeration. Within the volume, the individual articles are distinguished by Roman numbers added above the (original) page numbers. For obvious reasons, this makes the volume an extremely helpful tool for bibliographical references (but not a candidate for the beauty prize). The table of contents structures the fifteen studies according to the three categories "Reform"(I-III),"Ecclesiology" (IV-X), and "The Christian Life" (XI-XV); and it gives the original place of their publication. In terms of their topics, one can easily perceive Izbicki's interest and expertise in Nicholas of Cusa (studies III, VII, VIII, IX, and XIII) and ecclesiology in Dominican authors (I, II, IV, V, VIXI, XII, XIV, and XV). The individual studies are the following: I. "Reform and obedience in four conciliar sermons by Leonardo Dati, O.P." (2000); II. "The sins of the clergy in Juan de Torquemada's Defense of the Revelations of Saint Birgitta" (2005); III. "Forbidden colors in the regulation of clerical dress from the fourth Lateran Council (1215) to the time of Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464)" (2005); IV. "The Immaculate Conception and ecclesiastical politics from the Council of Basel to the Council of Trent: The Dominicans and their foes" (2005); V. "A papalist reading of Gratian: Juan de Torquemada on c. Quodcumque [C.24 q.1 c.6]"(2001);VI. "Cajetan's attack on parallels between church and state"(1999); VII. "Representation in Nicholas of Cusa"(2006); VIII. "An ambivalent papalism: Peter in the sermons of Nicholas of Cusa" (2001); IX."'Their cardinal Cusanus': Nicholas of Cusa in Tudor and Stuart polemics" (first publication); X. "Reject Aeneas! Pius II on the errors of his youth"(2003); XI. "Leonardo Dati's sermon on the circumcision of Jesus (1417)" (2004); XII. "Juan de Torquemada's defense of the conversos" (1999); XIII. "Nicholas of Cusa and the Jews" (2004); XIV. "The origins of the De ornatu mulierum of Antoninus of Florence" (2004); and XV. "Salamancan relectiones in the Fernán Núñez collection" (1998). The volume is rounded off by some "Addenda and Corrigenda," usually not more than one reference per article, and a most helpful index of (historical) persons and topics.