Download PDF | Katherine Van Liere_ Simon Ditchfield_ Howard Louthan - Sacred History_ Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World-Oxford University Press, USA (2012).
364 Pages
Preface
For well over a millennium after the appearance of Christianity, the story of the Christian Church occupied a privileged place in western historical thought. The Bible was the most respected historical text in medieval schools and universities, and salvation history was understood to be the central narrative in world history. These assumptions were manifested in a variety of historical writings, from universal chronicles (which began with the creation of the world and ended with the expectation of Christ’s return) to the copious lives of saints that constituted one of the most popular genres of medieval writing. Greco-Roman historiographical traditions that antedated Christianity did not die out entirely, but such classical genres as civil and diplomatic history, political biography, and natural history became largely subservient to the larger story of God’s providential care for his chosen people. Sacred history, in whatever literary form it appeared, was generally regarded as worthier than its counterpart, profane history.
This privileged status did not endure until modern times. By the eighteenth century profane history had regained centre stage, many traditions of classical historiography had been revived, and history had come to be seen, as it has been generally regarded ever since, as an essentially secular discipline. The most esteemed historical writers now sought human and natural causes and explanations for events. They tried to discern rational patterns that could be attributed not to a divine plan but to human nature, or to natural forces like geography, climate, or economics. When Enlightened philosophers wrote about the usefulness of history for European civilization, they typically highlighted these natural and secular inquiries and disparaged ‘sacred history’ as an archaic pursuit belonging to a less advanced stage of civilization. The sceptical philosophe Voltaire, for example, wrote an entry on histoire for the Encyclopédie (1764) that enumerated a wide range of other forms of history and their utility for modern life. He began it by tersely dispensing with ‘sacred history’ altogether: The history of events is divided into sacred and profane. Sacred history is an account of divine and miraculous operations by which God was formerly pleased to guide the Jewish nation and today guides our faith. I shall not pursue this respectable matter.
Voltaire’s anti-Christian bias by no means represents eighteenth-century European thought as a whole, but his attitude towards sacred history does reflect an undeniable trend: in historical thought, as in many other spheres of European intellectual life, the Christian world-view was the dominant paradigm before the Renaissance, and by the Enlightenment its importance had greatly diminished. As a consequence, the intermediate period—the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, or the long Renaissance—has suffered the unenviable fate of many a ‘transitional period’: it has been recognized as a forerunner of later developments more than appreciated on its own terms. Ever since Jacob Burckhardt’s 1860 masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, it has been a commonplace that the Renaissance ushered in ‘modern’ culture.
In Burckhardt’s wake, cultural historians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have often emphasized the secular and sceptical, or at least the pagan and unorthodox, elements of Renaissance thought, singling out writers like Niccolò Machiavelli for their bold reassertion of pre-Christian traditions such as classical republicanism and their denial of orthodox Christian teaching on political and moral subjects. Burckhardt’s thesis, and later variants such as Hans Baron’s ‘civic humanism’ thesis (which identified republican patriotism as the defining innovation of the Italian Renaissance), contain a great deal of truth. Yet in some fields, including the history of Renaissance scholarship, such arguments have often had the effect of diverting attention away from Renaissance writers who continued to practice more ‘medieval’ forms of historical writing, such as Church history and hagiography (the writing of saints’ lives).
As Alison Frazier has recently observed in an important study of Renaissance saints’ lives, such literature has often been treated with condescension, or simply overlooked altogether.2 Historical writing that adhered to a Christian world-view and centred on ecclesiastical themes seems difficult to reconcile with the characteristic ‘Renaissance’ attitudes that Peter Burke summed up in his 1969 classic, The Renaissance Sense of the Past: a keen sense of the distance between past and present; a critical approach to sources; a sceptical attitude towards myths; and an appreciation for human and natural (as opposed to supernatural) causation. Indeed, most of these attitudes seemed to point distinctly away from, rather than toward, traditional Christian historiography. Yet ‘sacred history’ was produced in abundance in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, both in traditional forms and in newer forms that were influenced by Renaissance humanism. The vast majority of European thinkers before the eighteenth century did not share Voltaire’s conviction that the supernatural had no place in historical thought.
They would much more readily have agreed with the Englishman Mathias Prideaux, who in the 1640s listed ‘Ecclesiasticall History’ first among seven branches of history and accorded it ‘precedency before other [kinds of history], in regard of its Antiquity, Dignity, and directive Certainty’. 3 The writing of sacred history in the long Renaissance period has certainly not been overlooked altogether in modern times. Many histories of scholarship, including the above-cited study by Peter Burke, have recognized the formative role that humanist Church historians such as Lorenzo Valla played in early modern scholarship. Modern Church historians of the Reformation era have long acknowledged the central place of ecclesiastical history in the debates of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. And as the reach of cultural history has expanded over the last three decades, social and cultural historians have paid increasing attention to many aspects of religion and religious thought, including some of its historical dimensions. Yet there still exist few comparative or synthetic studies of early modern sacred historiography. Some of the most important works on this important branch of learning, particularly from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period, have appeared in relatively specialized contexts that are better known to Catholic or Protestant Church historians than to general historians, let alone the wider reading public. This volume aims to draw attention to recent scholarship in the emerging field of early modern sacred historiography, and to suggest some fruitful directions for comparative thinking within the field, across national and confessional lines as well as across literary genres. While each chapter may be read in its own right as a case study of a particular form, instance, or use of sacred history, each one also engages with two broad comparative themes: the interplay between tradition and innovation in the scholarly methods of sacred historical writing, and the cultural uses of these writings within the various societies that produced them. These uses were many and varied: some personal, some political, some unifying, and some divisive. Sacred history in the Renaissance was not simply a holdover from an earlier, more religious era. It was a way that Europeans continued to articulate some of their most deeply cherished values and identities. Renaissance Christians turned to the Christian past for spiritual and moral guidance, aid in prayer and pilgrimage, insight into the religious history of newly discovered lands and peoples, and support for various kinds of corporate identity—whether national, provincial, dynastic, or confessional. In the interconfessional conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which grew in part out of conflicting visions of the Christian past, sacred history became the terrain on which some of the bitterest conflicts about Christian life, doctrine, and liturgy were waged. In this context, the study of the very early Church had particular significance. Like the Renaissance, the Reformation as an intellectual movement looked back to an exemplary (often idealized) past, and the early Protestant reformers took many of their sharpest critical arguments from Renaissance ecclesiastical history. Catholics countered the Protestant historical critique of the medieval Church with their own competing histories. By the later sixteenth century, this competition between Protestant and Catholic visions of early Christianity became, arguably, the dominant theme in sacred historiography, and debates about the nature of the early Church worked their way into more and more kinds of historical writing. These often polemical writings do not always constitute good history by the standards of modern critical scholarship. But if we judge the value of history by how much it mattered to contemporaries, then sacred history was perhaps never more valuable than in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This volume is divided into three thematic sections. Part I introduces Renaissance sacred history in its most traditional form, as a continuation of the genre of ecclesiastical history established in the fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea. In Chapter 1, Anthony Grafton discusses the influence of Renaissance humanism on ecclesiastical history from the mid fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. Renaissance Church historians were often self-consciously conservative and adhered closely to precedents established by Eusebius. But Grafton demonstrates that Church historians also introduced creative innovations in methods of research and publication. Humanism posed critical challenges for writers of Christian history. While some embraced the new critical methods and standards of evidence introduced by the humanist movement, the humanist emphasis on critical examination of evidence sometimes did threaten to undermine religious traditions that rested more firmly on communal consensus than on unambiguous textual or physical evidence. Thus religious historians often had to wrestle with inescapable tensions between criticism and piety. Many of the subsequent chapters in the volume offer further examples of the ways that writers in both the Catholic and the Protestant tradition tensions faced these critical challenges. Perhaps nowhere was the demand for sacred history greater in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than in the various movements for religious reform. Although the uses of history by Protestant and Catholic reformers have been treated quite extensively in earlier publications, we include two chapters on core elements of Protestant and Catholic historical scholarship, as an indispensable foundation to the stories told in the rest of this collection. Both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations were profoundly historical movements that aimed to restore earlier, more authentic versions of Christian worship and Christian society, and both used historical arguments to defend their positions. In Chapter 2, Euan Cameron explains how Protestant understandings and use of history came to differ radically in fundamental respects from Catholic ones. For Protestant reformers, the visible Catholic Church had ceased to be identical with the true Church founded by the Apostles. This posed the historical question of just when and how error and abuse could have entered into a Church that was under God’s providential care. Cameron shows that early Swiss and German historians, approaching these questions with a humanist appreciation for human fallibility, were willing to concede that the true Church in the past could sometimes have combined purity with error. As the Reformation progressed, however, and doctrinal positions hardened, humanist arguments allowing for error in the Church’s past gave way to more dogmatic approaches which insisted on sharper divisions between the true invisible Church and the false Roman one. By the end of the century the more dogmatic approach, often tinged with apocalypticism, had come to dominate Protestant thinking (in both reformed and Lutheran circles). This can be seen, for example, in the largest and most influential Protestant historical enterprise, the Magdeburg Centuries, which was more concerned with true versus false doctrine than with institutional Church history per se. The humanist and dogmatic approaches, however, were never wholly separate and irreconcilable paradigms. They were, rather, tendencies that different thinkers in subsequent decades would combine in varying measures. Challenged by these Protestant arguments, sixteenth-century Catholic writers reaffirmed the integrity of the visible Church and the historical continuity between the primitive Catholic Church and the modern one. This meant not only defending the medieval Church against Protestant charges of corruption, but also establishing the antiquity of Roman Catholic jurisdictional claims and liturgical practices. Thus in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–63), historical research into Christian antiquity became an indispensable tool of Catholic apologetics. Here, too, humanist and dogmatic approaches were often consciously in tension. In Chapter 3, Giuseppe Guazzelli examines the first great Catholic historical enterprise of the Counter-Reformation, the Annales ecclesiastici composed under papal auspices by Cardinal Cesare Baronio. Guazzelli shows how Baronio combined many of the critical techniques of humanist antiquarianism with an inevitably dogmatic treatment of early Church history, depicting an unchanging Catholic Church, semper eadem, always wisely and truly guided by the papacy. Baronio’s Annales were immensely influential both as a model for later Catholic writers and as a spur to Protestant competitors. Chapters 6, 7, and 9 all deal in part with historical projects that were inspired by Baronio’s work. Anti-Protestant polemic was not, however, the only theme of Catholic historical writing after Trent. As Simon Ditchfield makes clear in Chapter 4, historical writers in the service of the post-Tridentine Church responded not only to Protestant challenges but also to a range of internal needs— jurisdictional, liturgical, and theological—most of which predated the Reformation. For the Roman clergy, historia sacra meant a body of literature documenting the deeds of the Church and the clergy that stretched back uninterruptedly to New Testament times. Post-Tridentine Catholic scholars reprinted early medieval works on the history of the Church and its saints in great number.
They also continued the tradition of documenting and recording the Church’s deeds by producing new historical works in a variety of traditional genres. Indeed, with the resurgence of the Counter-Reformation papacy and the energetic worldwide expansion of Roman Catholicism, new works of Catholic historia sacra, many of them collaborative projects, were written and published on an unprecedented scale. This Catholic historical enterprise included both Roman-centred projects, such as the creation of the Vatican archive, and more provincial (if ultimately global) projects, such as the massive compendia of saints’ lives undertaken in the Low Countries by the Bollandists. Although both Catholic and Protestant writers conceived of the Church in universal terms, most early modern Christians defined themselves largely by regional identities—whether national, regional, provincial, or local. Part II considers the complex ways that sacred history intersected with national history writing, both in traditional chronicles and in other scholarly treatments of particular churches and patron saints. Religious themes were often central to chronicles and other national histories, since regional identity rested on shared understandings of a people’s Christian origins, patron saints, and struggles against religious enemies. As David Collins argues in Chapter 5, the prevalence of religious themes in German national histories of the Renaissance has been largely obscured by modern historians’ anachronistic imposition of two distinct categories of ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’. Collins examines German historiography down to the start of the Reformation, focusing on the energetic group of humanist writers whose collective efforts to elevate German history writing are known as the Germania illustrata, and showing that the ‘sacred’ elements of national history were central in their work. In Chapter 6, I examine the treatment of the early Spanish Church by Spanish chroniclers in the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. Particularly after the unification of Castile and Aragon by the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel, and the energetic promotion of humanist history writing by them and their Habsburg successors, national history became a valuable stage on which to highlight—and indeed to exaggerate—the antiquity of the Spanish Catholic Church and to stress its links with Rome and the biblical Apostles. This enterprise, like many of its kind, required writers to wrestle with difficult critical issues, and during the Counter-Reformation Spanish chroniclers increasingly favored Catholic piety over critical scepticism.
By the second half of the sixteenth century, the writing and reading of national history could not be separated from the international conflict between Catholic and Protestant Churches, and national identity came to be redefined increasingly in confessional terms. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 present three case studies of the uses of sacred history in societies in central Europe and in the British Isles that were bitterly divided between Catholic and Protestant allegiances. In Chapter 7, Howard Louthan shows how scholars in the Catholic principalities of Cologne, Bavaria, and Bohemia sought to reconstruct their regions’ earliest Christian past as a way to solidify modern Catholic identity in the politically charged context of the Counter-Reformation. In Chapter 8, Rosamund Oates examines the post-Reformation debates between English Protestants and Catholics over the origins of English Christianity and its relationship to the history of the universal Church. In Chapter 9, Salvador Ryan examines the corresponding debates that emerged in the neighbouring and subject kingdom of Ireland after the mid sixteenth century, when the intrusion of ‘new English’ Protestant settlers induced Irish Catholics to come to terms with both Protestantism and English political hegemony. Here the intersection between national and religious identity was even more complex, for the ‘old English’ settlers who were descended from medieval English conquerors shared a Catholic heritage with the indigenous Irish, and the Catholic population was divided over whether to offer political resistance to the Protestant English monarchy. In this context, Irish Catholic intellectuals constructed a historical account of Irish identity that stressed doctrinal orthodoxy and continuity above national origin. In all these scholarly enterprises, humanist historiography influenced the authors’ choice of sources and rhetorical strategies, but the critical approaches of humanist scholarship were often (in Rosamund Oates’s words) ‘subordinated to the larger purpose of illuminating God’s will’. Although Church history and national history constituted the two most influential paradigms for approaching the Christian past, not all historical writing in the early modern period took the universal Church or the nation as its point of departure. Part III offers a series of case studies of other ways in which Catholic writers sought meaning in the early Christian past, both in traditional forms of sacred history that grew directly out of medieval literature, and in more innovative kinds of writing with sacred historical themes. In Chapter 10, Jean-Marie Le Gall examines the broad range of Renaissance literary genres that depicted the lives of the early saints. As a Catholic kingdom with a large Protestant minority where humanism made deep inroads into intellectual life, France offers an excellent opportunity to observe the cultural cross-currents that shaped hagiographic writing in these centuries. Le Gall shows that despite the long hiatus in canonizing new saints (from 1523 to 1588), and despite the critical challenges to the cult of the saints from humanism and Protestantism, hagiography continued to flourish in Renaissance France, and was energetically revived in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because it served a wide range of cultural needs. The next two chapters discuss two other areas in which Catholic scholars inspired by Renaissance humanism sought to bring the early Christian past to bear on contemporary religious questions: understanding the history and geography of the Holy Land, and interpreting the earliest vestiges of Christian art. In Chapter 12, surveying the scholarly treatment of the early Christian paintings that were discovered in the Roman catacombs in the late sixteenth century, Irina Oryshkevich explains that the most conventional Catholic response to these discoveries was a dogmatic one; since Protestant polemicists had claimed that the early Church had not engaged in the ‘idolatrous’ use of religious images, Catholic polemicists responded polemically that these paintings proved the timeless liturgical importance of holy images. But Oryshkevitch highlights one remarkably sensitive Catholic writer, Jean l’Heureux (Macarius), who took a less doctrinaire approach to these paintings and (employing a ‘developmental’ model reminiscent of the early Protestant humanists described by Euan Cameron), recognized the mixture of truth and error in the early Church. Macarius used the catacomb paintings as the basis for a subtle argument about how the Christian uses of art changed over time. Adam Beaver shows in Chapter 13 that for Christian pilgrims, the critical standards of humanist historiography threatened to undermine the very foundations of pilgrimage itself by calling some of its geographical objects into question. Thus Renaissance writing about the Holy Land remained remarkably faithful to medieval historiographical traditions that grew out of pilgrim literature. By contrast, in the historiography of early Christian art, a much newer scholarly enterprise, Catholic authors exhibited a wide range of attitudes. Overseas imperial expansion in the sixteenth century gave European Christians new venues and new motives to seek out Christian origins. In Chapter 11, Liam Brockey considers the search by Portuguese chroniclers for the traces of the biblical Apostle Thomas in south-eastern India. Just as legends of apostolic foundations enhanced the status of individual churches in European lands, early Portuguese explorers and missionaries in India were intrigued by tales claiming that the Christians they encountered on India’s south-eastern coast were descended from the Apostle’s first converts. A series of Portuguese chroniclers scrutinized these legends and tried to reconcile them with the known records of the Apostle’s life, martyrdom, and relics. The task proved difficult, however, and in the end Christian missionaries found it easier to validate their own efforts in India by rejecting more of the local legends than they embraced.
The editors and contributors to this volume are aware that it is neither exhaustive nor perfectly balanced in its treatment of early modern sacred historiography. Had space permitted, we would have liked to include more treatment of the projection of Christian origins legends into non-western xii Preface cultures, as well as more substantial treatment of the influence of Jewish thought on Christian scholarship, and cross-cultural comparisons with Islamic and other traditions of sacred writing. We also recognize that Catholic writers are disproportionately represented here over Protestants. To some degree this is justified, given that Catholics outnumbered Protestants in Europe during this whole period and that Catholic historical writers were more inclined to embrace the notion of historia sacra (a term which, indeed, was rarely if ever used by Protestant scholars in the sixteenth century). Furthermore, such Protestant historiographical enterprises as the Magdeburg Centuries and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments have been quite amply treated in other recent literature. Still, we regret that there was not space to devote greater attention to less well-known Protestant writers. As our primary aim is to provoke interest in this burgeoning field, we hope that some of these inevitable omissions will serve as a stimulus to further research. This book has been more than two years in the making. It grew out of two colloquia, in October 2008 at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and June 2010 at the Notre Dame Centre in London. Draft versions of the chapters were shared and critiqued at these meetings, and the vision for the volume as a whole was refined. Three valued colleagues—Margaret Meserve, Alison Frazier, and Joanna Weinberg—played an important role in that early development process. Although unfortunately they were not able to contribute to the final volume, their enthusiasm for the project and stimulating interchanges with fellow authors have certainly enriched the final product. We are particularly indebted to Margaret Meserve, who organized and hosted our second colloquium and assisted with procuring reproducible images for the book. We are also grateful to our invited discussants at that second meeting—Matthias Pohlig, Jean-Louis Quantin, and Alexandra Walsham—for helping us all to sharpen our focus and to appreciate the complexity and richness of the many genres that fall under the aegis of historia sacra. The two colloquia were generously funded by the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship at Calvin College and by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame.
The Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship (CCCS) also funded editing and publishing costs for the volume. I am very grateful to two successive CCCS directors, James D. Bratt and Susan M. Felch, for their consistent enthusiasm and support for this venture; to Donna Romanowski and Dale Williams of CCCS and Harriet Baldwin of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters for skilled organizational help with our two colloquia; to José Alvarez, T. J. Anderson, Matt Dorn, Dylan Fay, John Quinn, and Erin Zavitz for their assistance with compiling the Index; to Jennifer Vander Heide for valuable editorial assistance; to Krista Robertson for two excellent maps; and to Frans Van Liere for both scholarly advice on a range of topics and endless patience during the whole editing project. Most of all, I am indebted to Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan for their expert collaboration in all the organizing and Preface xiii editing stages of this project, and to all of our contributors for their scholarly expertise, collegiality, and patience throughout the long revision process. It has been a joy to work with and to learn from them, both in person and longdistance, and to experience first-hand the truth of the humanist adage, ‘Paritas studiorum conciliat amicitiam.’ Katherine Elliot Van Liere Grand Rapids, Michigan
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق