Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters.
Marshall, Peter
Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters. By
Constance M. Furey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv +
258 pp. $65.00 cloth.
This is an elegantly written and perceptive monograph, with fresh
and interesting things to say about the dynamics of humanist scholarship
in the early Reformation period, and about the origins of that
apparently quintessentially Enlightenment phenomenon, the "Republic
of Letters." The book is a group portrait focusing on six
individuals about whose reading, writing, and corresponding practices we
know a fair amount: Erasmus, Thomas More, his daughter Margaret Roper,
Cardinals Reginald Pole and Gasparo Contarini, and the aristocratic
widow and poet Vittoria Colonna. Its central theme is how in varying
ways all of them were committed to a vision of spiritualized scholarship
and to the attempt to construct a kind of virtual religious community,
based on epistolary friendships and a shared approach to reading texts.
In contrast to traditional exegetical methods, reading became for them a
means both of transcendence and of solidarity, as the reader strove to
establish a relationship with a text's author. On all counts, the
model works best for Erasmus, a refugee from a monastic community with
solid walls and a communal rule, who became the linchpin of a
Europe-wide network of sympathetic correspondents. It was a model that,
as Furey admits, ultimately failed for Thomas More, as the community of
like-minded pious scholars in England buckled and compromised in the
face of Henry VIII's unyielding demands.
At the center of the picture Furey paints is an intriguing
modulation between public and private. Her subjects regarded their
scholarly pursuits as a type of withdrawal, a substitute for the
cloister. But at the same time they were often engaged actively in
public affairs and lived in a world where "private" spaces
often involved some aspect of display, and where systems of patronage
complicated any clear demarcation between public and private spheres.
Here, Furey's discussion of female participation in the Republic of
Letters is of particular interest. The inclusion of highly educated
women like Vittoria Colonna and Margaret Roper indicates the
distinctiveness of these networks, which self-consciously stood aside
from calculations of worldly advantage, without surrendering claims to
intellectual excellence and prestige. This was a fraternity where, if
gendered distinctions were not effaced, they were at least not
straightforwardly reinforced. It is striking that in a book dedication
Thomas More could address the nun Joyce Leigh as his "friend,"
a word usually freighted with connotations of likeness and equality.
Throughout the book, Furey makes a sensitive attempt to enter into
the subjectivity of her main characters and to insist on how reading,
writing, and learning were for them devotional acts, and on how their
desire for God was inseparable from a desire for affective relationships
with like-minded scholars. There is a historiographical point being made
here, for most modern studies of the origins of the Republic of Letters,
and of the early modern genesis of a new type of intellectual, have
explicitly or implicitly adopted a teleological and secularizing
perspective within which scholars start to shed a sense of the sacred in
order to embrace a devotion to scholarly exchange for its own sake.
Furey counters, convincingly, that secular notions of sociability can
fail to take account of what people might actually be seeking in their
relationships with others and points to an all-important
"transcendent dimension," even where the rituals and
traditions of the institutional Church appear to be marginalized.
There are some questions about the thesis. Furey has rather more of
substance to say about reading practices than about the construction of
spiritualized friendship, where the rhetorical conventions of
Renaissance letter-writing can prove a formidable thicket to negotiate.
One structural principle of the book is unfortunate, and threatens to
beg some important questions: her decision to exclude from close
consideration all who ended up supporting the Reformation on the grounds
that "learned men and women who committed themselves to a
Protestant vision of Christianity between 1520 and 1550 were part of a
new religious movement" (12) with radically different priorities.
Yet it was only over the course of these decades that divisions between
"Catholics" and "Protestants" became either clear or
permanent. This was a period when people were spiritually and (in the
case of Erasmus) literally on the move, when some intellectuals, like
Contarini, were conspicuously attempting to repair the growing schism,
and when many important figures (like Colonna's correspondent
Marguerite de Navarre) seemed to resist clear confessional labels. A
reference to the English reformer "Matthew Tyndale" (6) is an
unfortunate slip, as is the misdating (96) of the fifth-century
philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius. It is not quite accurate to say (137) that
the Nun of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, was hanged "under a revised law
of treason that was later used to convict More." The new law was in
fact a subsequent response to the Barton case. But such errors are
forgivable in a rewarding and thoughtful study, which serves not least
to remind us that, for the early sixteenth century, the phrase
"Christian humanism" is a patent tautology.
doi: 10.1017/S000964070800019X
Peter Marshall
University of Warwick
