Brunelleschi's Dome

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King, 167 pages

At the end of the 13th century, the Florentines decided that they required a new cathedral, as much to celebrate the city's growing prosperity as to replace the crumbling Santa Reparata.  An ambitious plan was approved, but progress was slow, and it was not until the beginning of the 15th century that preparations began for the construction of what would be the largest masonry dome ever constructed.  Filippo Brunelleschi's innovative proposal for the dome construction was ultimately selected over several more conventional plans, including one by Lorenzo Ghiberti.  The dome was completed sixteen years later and remains an iconic symbol of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

The story of this construction, through two decades of war, plague, and civil strife, is the subject of Ross King's book.  It is a promising subject indeed - a great construction project during one of the most colorful and fertile periods in human history, a contest of human ingenuity and the feuding wills of great artists and their patrons.  Unfortunately, King's book is deadly dull.  Working with incomplete historical and biographical records, he constructs his own account of events, asserting that a figure "must have" done this, or "seems to have" done that.  He plays equally fast and loose with history (at one point he flatly declares that the technique of perspective was "lost", then shortly thereafter says it was abandoned as "dishonest") and even basic facts (he asserts that other than Brunelleschi, the "only other person interred inside the cathedral was St Zenobius", which seems to be simply untrue).  Worse than all this, he seems to regard only the technical challenges of construction to be worth writing about, resulting in a book that contains nothing of beauty, nothing of poetry, and precious little of mind or spirit.

Fascism in Spain

Fascism in Spain: 1923-1977 by Stanley G Payne, 479 pages

The rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and '30s had their impact on the political landscape of Spain.  Far-right activists, seeking a way forward in the crisis of the interwar years, naturally found attractive the path shown to them by Mussolini in Italy, a nation with a history and culture so intimately connected with that of Spain.  Various leaders alternately embraced and rejected the fascist label, incorporated elements of fascist ideology into their own thinking, sought assistance from the fascist powers, or adapted fascist symbols and slogans to a Spanish context.

However, as Stanley Payne demonstrates in his landmark history of Spanish fascism, fascism was never comprehensively adopted by the Spanish far right.  Even Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, was ambivalent about many aspects of fascism as it was practiced in Italy and especially in Germany.  Certainly Franco resisted identification with fascism, even in 1940-1 when the Axis seemed on the verge of total victory, effectively neutering the Falange by incorporating it into his new uniparty.  Efforts to strengthen the syndicalist movement within the Franco dictatorship were systematically thwarted.  Payne suggests a number of reasons for this, including the historical regionalism of the Spanish right and the strength of Catholic traditionalism as an alternative to fascism.  

The most important element of Payne's masterful study is not its thoroughness, but its fundamental refusal to treat the study of fascism as something akin to demonology.  Not that Payne is blind to the violent, revolutionary component that is essential to the ideology, but his goal is understanding rather than judgement, and he doesn't feel any need to restate every few pages that comprehension does not mean approval.  The result is a work that allows the reader to see the meaning that fascism had for mass man in the first half of the twentieth century, and therefore its appeal, growth, and failure.

Real Presence

The Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Blessed Eucharist Proved From Scripture in Eight Lectures Delivered in the English College, Rome by Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, 328 pages

As the full title explains, this is a printed collection of eight lectures which the future Cardinal delivered at the English College in Rome in 1836.  As might be expected by the audience, the lectures are academic in tone and content.  They are also straightforward defenses on Scriptural and philosophical grounds of the Catholic belief in the Real Presence, and there is no devotional spirit to them, nor do they reveal much about their author, who would soon become the first Archbishop of Westminster.  This does not mean that they have no value, but that there is little reason to prefer them to other texts on the same subject.

Life of Robert Southwell

The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr by Christopher Devlin, 324 pages

Born into a well-connected family in England in the middle of the sixteenth century, as a teenager Robert Southwell, possibly under the influence of recusant relations, converted to Catholicism and departed to the Continent where he could practice his faith freely, beyond the reach of Protestant persecution.  Attracted, like many devout young men of the time, to the Society of Jesus, he entered the Jesuits after an initial rejection and became first a student and later a professor at the English College in Rome.  He left behind this position to become a missionary in his homeland, where he managed to minister to the Catholic community for several years before finally being cornered, captured, tortured, and executed.  Southwell's poetry, much of it written while in hiding, would serve as an inspiration to Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Hopkins, among others, while his holy life and martyrdom led to his canonization in 1970, 14 years after this biography was published.

In the author's note that begins this biography, Christopher Devlin connects Southwell with St Edmund Campion, the illustrious Jesuit scholar and martyr of the preceding generation, and refers readers to the "brilliant study" of Campion by Evelyn Waugh.  Just as Southwell lived happily in the shadow of Campion, so Devlin writes in the shadow of Waugh.  While Devlin cannot match Waugh's literary genius, he compensates with thorough scholarship, something sorely needed when the historical record is so fragmentary.  

Boyne Water

The Boyne Water: The Battle of the Boyne, 1690 by Peter Berresford Ellis, 152 pages

In 1690, the deposed Catholic King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, James II, backed by France's Louis XIV, seized control of Ireland and attempted to use it as a stepping stone to reclaim his throne from his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.  William landed his primarily English and Dutch troops in northern Ireland, and James resolved to use his largely Irish and French army to block William's advance on Dublin at the river Boyne.  The battle was brief, James' forces were routed, and James himself made the defeat seem decisive by returning to France rather than attempting to carry on the fight in Ireland, where his supporters would continue to resist until the Battle of Aughrim the following year.  By the 19th century, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne became the occasion for annual celebrations by Irish Protestants, and the Battle itself became understood as one of the turning points of Irish history.

According to Peter Berresford Ellis, this is all very exaggerated.  In the context of the Williamite Wars, he argues, it is Aughrim which was the final, decisive defeat, but even more importantly he sees the Jacobite cause as alien to Ireland itself.  Ellis contends that while James was able to rouse the Irish Catholics to his side, his restoration would have had little effect on the course of Irish history.  Indeed, insofar as the struggle was a personal one between rival claimants to the throne, Ellis' sympathy is entirely with William, who conducted his campaign in Ireland with dash and daring, in stark contrast to James, who proved timid and uncertain.

It is precisely in his portrayal of the individuals involved in the battle that Ellis is at his best, presenting an array of memorable characters, from William's grizzled, grumpy general the Duke of Schomberg to the bold cavalier, James' bastard son the Duke of Berwick.  As a result, the narrative of the battle proves highly interesting despite the author's claims that it was not tremendously historically significant.