Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters

Precisely because they were critical of much of their medieval religious and cultural heritage, many humanists felt alienated from the institutions — ecclesiastical, political, and domestic — in which they pursued their careers; and, according to this book, they found no sense of community in the institutions they served. In Germany, many such humanists found this sense of community by adhering to the Reformation. Constance Furey does not deal with that group. Her study is explicitly about intellectuals, or literati, who remained Catholic but created informal associations through which they found inspiration and fellowship. They were, she suggests, predecessors of the critical, secular intellectuals of the following three centuries, but they placed religion at the very center of their identity. She also claims that despite the influence of traditional sexist ideas, these friendships were ungendered, so that men and women — Reginald Pole and Vittoria Colonna, for instance — could form intimate, spiritual friendships essentially free of sexual overtones.

The difficulty comes in the selection of individuals to study. Most of Furey's choices are not surprising. North of the Alps, they include Erasmus, More, Colet, Budé, Marguerite de Navarre, and, less convincingly, More's daughter Margaret Roper. In Italy, all of her examples are associated with the religious groups known as spirituali. In the north and south alike, most of her subjects tended toward an evangelical theology, so that many of them were accused of being sympathizers with Luther.

In general, Furey's selections work least well for the Northerners. Budé does not belong here at all: he was a great classical scholar but intellectually narrow, conventionally Catholic, and cold and withdrawn. Colet was learned, but only within a limited range, and hostile to many facets of the humanist program. Contrary to Furey's claim, there is no way in which Colet, a man totally unaware of the importance of Greek for biblical studies, could have had a decisive influence on Erasmus's development into a great biblical scholar. Nor was Colet a layman: he was the rich and influential dean of St. Paul's. Erasmus and More provide a better case. They were different in many ways, and they did not share the same religious sensibility or concept of religious reform, but they were soulmates from the time they first met.

The Italians provide better examples. Pietro Bembo, Michelangelo Buonarroti (the artist), Reginald Pole (an exiled cousin of King Henry VIII but in intellectual and spiritual matters close to the Italian spirituali), and Vittoria Colonna constitute a defensible grouping for this study. Bembo, Michelangelo, and Colonna were the leading lyric poets of their generation. The other Italian figures who receive attention as learned spirituali here are Gasparo Contarini and Jacopo Sadoleto.

Of the individuals studied, those who made sustained efforts to address general problems of spiritual and institutional reform, rather than just to seek personal fulfillment, were Erasmus, who had no intimate emotional link with any of this group except More, and three of the Italians: Contarini, Pole, and Sadoleto were major figures in the efforts of Pope Paul III to assert papal leadership and calm the religious upheaval. All three were made cardinals in 1535 and 1536; all were appointed to the reform commission that prepared the famous document that analyzed the failings of the Curia and proposed a serious and costly scheme of reforms. Colet was a genuine Catholic reformer, but only within a narrow scope. Bembo, also a cardinal, played a generally reformist role in curial politics but was primarily engaged in his literary work. For the others, the goal for spiritual friendships was their own personal fulfillment. They may have talked about general reform, but they did little or nothing to address this need. Essentially, they were interested in the religious and intellectual life of privileged and spiritually enlightened individuals like themselves, and they had little to say to the rest of society. Even Marguerite — who should not be identified here as "a French queen" (7), a title she never held — was concerned mainly with her own longing for spiritual security. She served as patron and protector of some French evangelicals who eventually played a more active role in religious reform, but she avoided actions that truly addressed the hard issues of French religious life.