Winchester Cathedral Close

Winchester Cathedral Close: Its Historical and Literary Associations by John Vaughan, 275 pages

This is not a history of the cathedral itself, but of the monastic enclosure that surrounded it for centuries prior to the Reformation, elements of which survive to this day.  John Vaughan, a resident canon in the early years of the 20th century, follows these traces through to his own time, covering not only the buildings but also the flora and fauna of the cathedral precincts, as well as the scriptorium and the library collection.

Vaughan's intimate knowledge of his surroundings breathes a special vitality into what might otherwise be a very dry work, at times suggesting the sweet odour of contemplation that once incensed the air here.  Few, perhaps, will care about details of the alterations to the undercroft, but anyone looking for a testament of love of place will be enchanted.

A World Lit Only by Fire

Title: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age             Author: William Manchester            Paperback: 299 pgs.

     I picked up this book to learn more about the Middle Ages, but was somewhat disappointed.  The author writes mostly about the Renaissance, contrasting it with the worldview of what he considers the extremely benighted medieval era.  Evidently, Manchester thought the events of the Middle Ages weren’t worth writing about, as he makes the rather astounding claim that very little of significance happened in Europe during that thousand-year period (roughly 500-1500 A.D.).  He concedes that kings and popes died and new rulers took their places, that wars were fought and that natural disasters wreaked havoc on the population.  Yet it has little historical significance in Manchester’s estimation because the impact of these events on the masses, he says, was “negligible.”  In my view, the author overstates his case— I believe the Middle Ages weren’t as dark as he makes them out to be and that there were many significant events that took place during the era— but his very dim view of the Middle Ages is shared by some historians.

     It’s one thing to have a different historical opinion— an interpretation of the facts that happens to be at some variance with mine.  But it’s a more serious thing when Manchester makes demonstrably false claims in an attempt to show how wretched the Middle Ages were.  One example: he claims that there were no such things as clocks in the Middle Ages, yet the mechanical clock is known to have been invented in the late 1200’s.  I even found an article about a clock that is still intact built in the medieval era (I would guess that it’s not the only one).  Manchester also claimed that educated Christians at the time believed the Earth was flat, yet this claim has long been debunked.  Quotes from Christian intellectuals of the time, such as Bede, Isadore of Seville, Boethius, Hermannus Contractus and Thomas Aquinas, show that they clearly believed that the world was round.


    Manchester accurately describes how discoveries made during the Renaissance threatened cherished beliefs about the world (such as how Copernicus’ discovery of a heliocentric universe imperiled the medieval belief that the sun revolved around the Earth).  These beliefs were thought to be closely related to their Christian faith, though Christians today would not look at them that way.  When these beliefs were refuted, Manchester suggests that it caused most educated people during the Renaissance to turn completely away from Christianity.  This is simply not true; intellectuals did not, for the most part, abandon their faith.  In fact, pioneering textual criticism of the Bible by Renaissance Humanists actually helped lead to the Christian movement called the Reformation.  Educated people in the Renaissance may have been very divided in religion due to that great upheaval, but they still thought of themselves as Christians and found a way to reconcile their faith with the new discoveries.


     In spite of all the above criticisms, I have to admit that this is still a pretty compelling book, which is why I read it in its entirety.  For one thing, the book seems to be generally historically accurate.  Then, too, Manchester tells a great story.  The most fascinating part was the last section, devoted to Manchester’s favorite explorer, Ferdinand Magellan.  As you may remember, Magellan was the Portuguese explorer, sailing under the flag of Spain, who discovered the South American strait that bears his name.  More importantly, this discovery enabled his expedition to be the first to sail all the way around the world (Magellan himself died before his ships returned to Spain).  Reading Manchester’s thrilling account, I certainly learned some interesting things I didn’t know about Magellan.  For example, Manchester writes that he was considered a traitor by his countrymen because his expedition was sponsored by Spain.  The author also describes how Magellan overcame a mutiny during the expedition, showing what an extraordinary leader he was.


     Even though I didn’t learn about what happened during the Middle Ages, I did gain insight into the Renaissance and the mindset of the Middle Ages, in spite of Manchester’s errors.  I give it 3 out of 5 stars.  ⭐⭐⭐

 - John W.

Reformations

Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Carlos MN Eire, 757 pages

It is not an accident that Carlos Eire's study of the fragmentation of Western Christianity in the early modern era, between the start of construction on the new St Peter's Basilica and the end of the Thirty Years War, is titled Reformations rather than "the Reformation".  Taking a broad view of his subject, Eire traces the development of a diverse range of expressions of the perennial Christian desire for reform, given new force and direction by the humanism of the Renaissance.  This is complemented by a distant but nevertheless real appreciation of the intimate relationship between religion, politics, economics, and culture, as well as a conscious commitment "to allow the past to be understood on its own terms" and avoid "either-or reductionism."

While it is much too late to avoid variations on the value-laden word "reform", it might be hoped that a better effort might be made in the employment of such ambiguous terms as "Scriptural", "superstition", and "rational".  Of course, to thread one's way through all of the theological niceties would require at least a dozen books each as long as Eire's, which makes some simplification a necessary evil. While Reformations is hardly the final word on such a complex and contentious period, neither does Eire imagine it to be.  It is, however, an excellent beginning for anyone seeking to understand the era and its legacy.

Last Divine Office

The Last Divine Office: Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Geoffrey Moorhouse, 256 pages

The Last Divine Office is a portrait of the English Reformation as viewed from the choir stalls at Durham Cathedral.  The book begins with an extended history of the cathedral, the attached Benedictine monastery which supplied its clergy, and the shrine of St Cuthbert which provided its focus.  Events in the outside world are kept largely in the background as the monks cycle through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of their Lord in the liturgical year, year after year, with the archbishop and monastery steadily growing in wealth and influence.  Even after Henry VIII's break with Rome, life for the monks continues more or less as normal, even as the process of accretion reverses, with the monastery's holdings methodically stripped away layer by layer to feed the royal treasury.  By the end of Elizabeth's reign, the monastery was a shadow of its former self, but, as Moorhouse reveals, an oddly substantial shadow.

Moorhouse covers the subject with skill, sweeping through centuries of history without becoming either boring or superficial.  Most importantly for the story he has chosen to tell, he ably conveys a sense of place - the reader is able to smell the accumulated reside of centuries of incense, hear the echoes of the Latin chants, feel the impress of the personalities of the patron saints as they shaped the history of the community.  Less convincingly, Moorhouse portrays Cuthbert Tunstall, who served as Prince-Archbishop of Durham from 1530 to 1559, under Henry VIII and all of his children, as the model of an Anglican bishop - able to bend with the passions of the day in order to preserve what is most worth preserving.  Unfortunately, this seems to neglect the lessons of Tunstall's own experience, which led the man who took the Oath of Supremacy under Henry to refuse to do so under Elizabeth.

Erasmus of Rotterdam

Erasmus of Rotterdam by Stefan Zweig, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, 247 pages

Desiderius Erasmus was a giant of his time, the center of the republic of letters, a friend of St Thomas More and Martin Luther, the man whose Greek edition of the New Testament became the basis for the Textus Receptus recognized as authoritative for three centuries.  A master scholar and master ironist, Erasmus managed to simultaneously fulfill the roles of Europe's leading intellectual and her leading fool.

Stefan Zweig was one of the most celebrated biographers of the early twentieth century, and it is easy to see why - rather than attempting to construct a detailed photograph of his subject's life, he paints an engrossing word-portrait.  In his estimation, Erasmus was the first of a new type - the man of the book, set apart equally from the man of war, the man of the land, and the man of the Church.  He lived his life, it seems, in the pages of books, either reading or, far more often, writing.  Indeed, Zweig provides a rare example of the term "ivory tower" being used in a positive sense, although even he expresses a little frustration at a subject who often "lighted up a problem" but "never solved one."  An Austrian writing in 1934, like Zweig, might view a lifelong refusal to commit to a cause - any cause - as an admirable trait, but readers in other times and places might not.  If it is true that his is an "essentially modern spirit", an evaluation of Erasmus as a brilliant but ultimately hollow man has a much broader application than the historical figure himself.

Politicizing the Bible

Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300-1700 by Scott W Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, 566 pages

The historical-critical approach to the Bible - examining Scripture as a historically conditioned collection of texts - is generally considered a dogmatically and politically neutral approach which is rooted in the Enlightenment.  Hahn and Wiker trace its origins back 400 years earlier, to disputes over nominalism and realism at the end of the Middle Ages.  In the process, they reveal how the development of historical criticism was involved in the process of secularization, and how both were entangled in the rise of nationalism.  In addition to the expected (Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke), the authors manage to draw in figures that secularized history tends to undervalue and misunderstand (Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, Wycliffe, Luther).

Hahn and Wiker ably expose the manner in which a supposedly disinterested quest for truth is, in fact, a mission of disenchantment itself inspired by prior ideological commitments, enabled by the Averroistic doctrine of double truth and the Polybian conception of religion as a tool to control the unenlightened masses.  More than a simple study of one form of biblical scholarship, Politicizing the Bible, like A Secular Age and The Unintended Reformation, is an intriguing, enlightening exploration of the intellectual currents flowing into modernity.

Reformation of Images

The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England 1535-1660 by John Phillips, 210 pages

Over the course of little more than a century, beginning in the reign of Henry VIII and cresting under the Protectorate, religious art in England, ubiquitous in the Middle Ages, was sought out and destroyed in churches, marketplaces, and even in private homes.  As John Phillips relates, this destruction was driven by a complex set of religious and secular motives, chiefly the fear of idolatry, the rejection of matter in favor of spirit, growing suspicion of the human imagination, concern for public order, and simple greed.  He demonstrates how doctrines concerning the use and abuse of images were inextricably tied to other doctrines involving the sacraments, the ministerial priesthood, the cult of saints, the veneration of relics, monasticism, pilgrimages, and the entire social dimension of the Church.  The rejection of sacred images, or their acceptance, was thus emblematic of an entire worldview.

The first half of the book, covering the period up to the Elizabethan settlement, is solid, but has largely been superseded by Eamon Duffy's masterpiece The Stripping of the Altars.  The second half, discussing iconoclasm and the definition of Anglicanism as against Puritanism under the Stuarts and Cromwell, is equally good, and has not, to my knowledge, yet been surpassed.

Revolution of the Saints

The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics by Michael Walzer, 320 pages

In a time of transition, there emerges an ideological elite which celebrates self-discipline, and seeks to reorder society along lines of its own devising.  The unwashed masses lacking the dedication and enthusiasm necessary for self-discipline, the faction embraces state-imposed repression to force the recalcitrant into the mold.  The faction is opposed to the existing, unpopular government - indeed, much of the elite spends time in exile - and so plots and ultimately carries out the violent, revolutionary overthrow of the old regime and the old, traditional relationships and ways of life associated with it.

This could accurately describe the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, but in this book Walzer demonstrates that the Puritans also fit the description.  While the German Lutherans and French Huguenots were led by the native aristocracy, British Puritans, dominated by ministers from predominately middle-class backgrounds, were initially outside their national power elite.  In response, they evolved a revolutionary ideology which involved the use of force to reshape a natural political order which, in their Calvinist theology, was regarded as totally depraved.  The Puritans were led by an ideologically-pure intellectual elite, and pioneered techniques for control of the masses.  These developments led directly to the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, and the rule of Cromwell's Protectorate, but also the demise of the "holy commonwealth" and its replacement by Lockean liberalism.

The book feels as if it could have been twice as long and still not exhausted the subject.

Cleaving of Christendom

The Cleaving of Christendom by Warren H Carroll, 744 pages

In the fourth part of The History of Christendom, Carroll covers the period from the beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the death of Cardinal Mazarin.  These years of war and struggle saw Muslim battle Catholic, Catholic battle Protestant, and Protestant battle Protestant.  It was an era of armies and armadas.  It was the time of Martin Luther, Henry VIII, John Calvin, Good Queen Mary and Bloody Bess, France's three Henrys, Thomas and Oliver Cromwell, Charles V and Philip II, Gustavus Adolphus and his daughter Christina, Cardinal Richelieu, and two False Dmitrys.

The Cleaving of Christendom follows seamlessly in the steps of The Glory of Christendom, in ways both good and bad.  Carroll deftly interweaves multiple narrative threads to bring unity to the historical record, distilling vast amounts of information into digestible packets.  At the same time, there is a tendency to focus on the purely political elements of history - understandable when discussing Christendom in the age of cuius regio, eius religio - and Carroll's definition of Christendom includes only those areas that kept the Catholic faith.

Humanism, Reform, and the Reformation

Humanism, Reform, and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy, 225 pages

St John Fisher was the Bishop of Rochester from 1504 until his death in 1535, and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge during the same period.  Renowned as a humanist and patron of scholars, friends with Erasmus of Rotterdam, Johann Maier von Eck, and St Thomas More, Fisher stubbornly refused to recognize Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England, and was executed on the same day as More.

This book, a compilation of papers presented at a Cambridge symposium in 1985, examines the various facets of Fisher's multifaceted life, including his impact on the University, his pastoral style as bishop, his apologetical work against Luther, and his resistance to royal absolutism.  The figure revealed escapes easy categorization - neither a progressive nor a reactionary, with one foot in the humanist world of letters and the other in the scholastic world of ideas.  Above all, it reveals Fisher to have been thoroughly human, as all saints are.