Kuntz, Marion Leathers. The Anointment of Dionisio: Prophecy and Politics in Renaissance Italy.

Hartle, Ann

KUNTZ, Marion Leathers. The Anointment of Dionisio: Prophecy and Politics in Renaissance Italy. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. xviii + 446 pp. Cloth, $55.00--In the spring of 1566, a mysterious stranger appeared in Venice and began to preach around the Piazza San Marco. He called himself Dionisio Gallo, and no one has ever discovered whether that was his real name. Dionisio had come from France where he had apparently been rector of the College de Lisieux, although even that small detail of his life has not been established definitively. He claimed that in 1563 the Virgin Mary had anointed him in a mystical vision and that his prophetic mission was initiated with this anointment. Through his preaching and his writing, he criticized many of the same abuses in the Church that had been cited by Luther and by the reform commission established by Pope Paul III. The Council of Trent had completed its sessions, but Dionisio, along with many others, did not believe that the Council had accomplished the work of reform.

Eventually Dionisio came to the attention of the Inquisition and was imprisoned over a period of a year and a half. During that time he was questioned often, usually confounding the inquisitor with his enigmatic answers and his counterquestions. His inquisition was apparently atypical since he was asked little about his beliefs concerning doctrine. The inquisitor's greatest concern centered on the question of the Church's right to hold riches and property, which was a crucial question for both Catholic and Protestant reformers. After enduring the horrible conditions of prison life, he was found guilty of holding public assemblies contrary to the command of the Holy Office, assemblies at which he expressed some heretical and scandalous opinions. However, the judges decided that he had acted "not from error of intellect but from a certain disturbance of soul, agitated by certain disquieting humors" (p. 176). Therefore they concluded that he could not be held responsible for those actions. He was banished from Venice and nothing more is known of his life after that.

Dionisio Gallo's brief appearance on the Venetian stage allows Marion Kuntz to display the rich tapestry of life in that city through the narrow window of its prophetic preoccupations. There was apparently a strong link between the Venetian nobility and prophetic preacher-reformers who were attracted to Venice because of its openness to the prophetic voice. Humanists and artisans testify to the prophetic ambience. It was, for example, in Venice that Guillaume Postel translated the cabalistic Zohar from the original Aramaic into Latin. The prophetic voice in Venice was grounded in medieval and Biblical sources and focused itself chiefly on the reform of the Church.

Although this book does not explicitly address the philosophical issues of the day--indeed, Dionisio himself seldom dealt with philosophical or theological themes--it does provide insight into the relationship between religion and politics in Venice and in the Renaissance world in general. Thus it brings to life in vivid detail the setting in which modern political philosophy was born.

Dionisio believed "that his role was to bring about the accord between heaven and earth by demanding that the Church be reformed. The reformation of the Church would then signal a reformation of society, a universal brotherhood" (p. 20-1). His work, the Legatio, provided the "true and absolute method" for accomplishing the reform of the Church and society (p. 209). Dionisio saw himself as inaugurating a new order of things, a universal state in which society would be ordered according to divine principles. His Legatio was the constitution of that new order. In this he echoes Guillaume Postel who also dreamed of a universal monarchy both spiritual and political.

There is much about Dionisio, as Kuntz presents him, that suggests that the judgment of the Inquisition was correct. This was a man who suffered from disquieting humors. (He proposed, for example, that he should direct the church of Gaul and Germany, while the pope directed that of Italy and Spain.) Nevertheless, he allows us to imagine a world in which the question of the relationship between religion and politics is not only taken seriously but actually debated in the public square.

Marion Kuntz's treatment of prophecy also gives us a glimpse of the role of reason and the claims of reason in that debate. "There is an important relationship in the sixteenth century between the prophetic voice and the emphasis on human reason" (p.135). The prophet believed that his reason had been restored by Christ, that his understanding had been restored to its state before the Fall. The philosopher would like to know more about this possibility of reason and whether it is in any way connected to the notion of reason that is about to emerge in modern Europe. This book is a work of extensive scholarship and erudition, and a worthy successor of Marion Kuntz's work on Postel. At its deepest level, it is an appreciation of the truth of the "myth of Venice."--Ann Hartle, Emory University.